by Eando Binder
It would truly be a tableau from the Stone Age, fought in the same way and for the same fundamental—agricultural land. The thought of empire—which had marked the close of the last Stone Age—was not yet born.
Ellory saw the hand of Antarka, or the conspicuous absence of it, in this too. They didn’t interfere in the border wars for a very good reason. Their domination of the Stone Age world was made simple among a collection of little tribal states which had no thought of uniting for common defense!
“How long will this war last?” Ellory asked.
“Possibly a year. At least months.” Sem Onger sighed. “The blood of youth will enrich the land for whichever side wins. Ah, if we only had a quick means of victory—”
He glanced at Ellory.
“Your science, that glowing wax—can it help us?”
Ellory thrilled, for both of them so obviously looked up to him as one who could work wonders, if he chose. And yet, what could he do?
“No, not that,” he said thoughtfully, already shelving the mystery of the glowing-wax as something for future research. His mind labored. What could he do now, to help them? Metals—if he only had those.
And then, clearly, it leaped into his mind, like a stroke of lightning.
“I think I can help!” he exclaimed.
“You mean you will join our troops, Humrelly?”
Sharina was looking at him in such a way that Ellory wished he could say yes.
“No again, angel. But I’m going to arm those troops with metal weapons!”
Metal weapons, iron ones, from the oxide-heaps in the ruins of New York! Ellory’s mind hummed. Charcoal to reduce the oxide, clay pan to hold the molten metal, bellows for forced draft—details could be solved as he went along. And then he would have iron? Even the crudest of iron weapons would give the Noraks the advantage over their enemies in hand-to-hand struggle.
Ellory glowed within himself. He was about to launch himself into a career, in this second Stone Age. A career that had no limiting horizon, save his own ingenuity and courage.
The excitement of M-day reigned in the Norak city on the Hudson, when they arrived. Men in uniforms of banded leather had gathered in open places, preparing for the march to battle. Wagons rumbled by, loaded with supplies. Fast horsemen sped by, to carry the message and call to arms to outlying sections of the little nation. Shouts rose in the air against the hated Quoise.
Though it was a small Stone Age affair, Ellory realized that to these people it was as vital and important as any great war of his time.
Jon Darm, just concluding a war council with his chieftains at the Royal House, permitted Ellory to enter, with Sem Onger and Sharina.
Ellory spoke to the point.
“I’ll make metal weapons for you, in the ruins of ancient Norak. I’ll get the metal from red dust around the towers. I’ll need a dozen men and several wagon loads of charcoal, clay and animal skins.”
“You will make metal out of red dust?” said Jon Darm in Stone-Age wonder. He seemed dubious. “How long would it take?”
“No more than a month,” Ellory hazarded.
Mal Radnor spoke up suddenly.
“Metal weapons? What good would they be?” His voice became half taunting. “I think your good right arm, Humrelly, would do us more service!”
It was, in a manner of speaking, a challenge to his manhood. Ellory saw that in all their eyes. Flushing, he clenched his fists and half stepped toward the young chieftain.
But then he stopped. By the Stone Age sense of values, he would be less of a man if he pursued his metal-gleaning. But it would do them more good.
Jon Darm himself spoke hastily.
“I do not presume to hold the rod of authority over you, Humrelly, for you are a freeman of the past. However, in this time of war, men and supplies cannot be spared easily. I will give you one wagonload, and Sem Onger may be your helper.”
The chief waved a hand of dismissal and Ellory choked down remonstrance. For the first time, since his resurrection, he had run into Stone Age stupidity. But he excused Jon Darm. It was war. His nation faced crisis. He could not listen to strange new ideas, even from the man of the past whose time had known miracles. He could not be expected to.
Ellory smiled grimly. The man from the past would have to prove the worth of his idea.
The following day, Ellory and Sem Onger were en route to the ruins of New York again, accompanied by an extra wagon-load of supplies for an extended stay. Parties of mounted soldiers passed them, bound for battle, with the repeated cry of “Death to the Quoise!”
They were armed variously with huge long-bows and feather-tipped arrows, short stout spears of fire-hardened wood, gnarled clubs, and maces with chipped stone heads. So might the Neolithic aborigines have ridden to battle, ten or fifteen thousand years ago.
Ellory mentally armed them with double-edged sabers and iron maces of crushing strength.
But strangely, in his thoughts, the glowing-wax rose to the fore, a symbol of things to come after this petty affair were done with. He had been sidetracked temporarily from following that goal. It represented a form of radioactivity and locked power. What might it not lead to—transmuted metals, electricity, budding science! And controlled atomic energy!
As he passed through devastated Westchester, he began rebuilding the city. Steel towers reared, trains rumbled along, aircraft whined overhead. The Stone Age people of the Fiftieth Century moved into a greater civilization than Earth had ever known. Wonderful cities, without slums, hummed busily. The arts flourished all over the world. All peoples were blessed with prosperity, under a beneficent rule, with Antarka relegated to a minor role. The glory of achievement for its own sake became a shining crown to humanity’s striving. Perhaps there would be interplanetary travel—
“Humrelly, do you dream of the past?”
Ellory started. He had been talking aloud, and Sem Onger’s wrinkled old face peered at him quizzically.
“No, old man, I dream of the future,” Ellory muttered. “But I think I’m a fool. The best I may do is make a few iron tools before the ruin-supplies give out. I may not solve the secret of the glowing wax, on which my dream was based.”
After a day of unpacking and getting settled in a spot near one of the skeleton towers, Ellory began construction of a circular stone kiln with bricks and clay—staple building materials in this age.
There was a storm that night as Ellory lay down to sleep on his couch of home-spun blankets. He listened to the rain beating against the hide tent.
Here he was, in a primitive world, about to lead the way up the first rung of the ladder toward advancement. At least, regardless of results, he would have the anodyne of striving to still his dreamy unrest.
In three days, Ellory had shaped a wide flat clay pan over the brick firepot. It had dried quickly in the hot sun. The two handles of a simple bellows of wooden sides, cowhide pouch, and rawhide thongs, projected from an aperture.
Ellory carried red dust, almost pure iron oxide, from the base of the tower in a stone pot and dumped it into the clay pan. Then he loaded the fireport with charcoal and started a blaze.
Sem Onger had helped with pitiful eagerness. He bristled with innumerable questions, insisting on knowing what each item and step was for. His mind proved to be nimble, for all of his years. He learned faster than Ellory had thought possible.
While the charcoal fire grew and the clay pan began to simmer, Ellory read in the manual he had brought along from the crypt’s science books, refreshing his memory on metal smelting.
How different this was from the giant Bessemer smelters and open-hearth pits of his time! Could he hope to produce molten iron, when his total experience in that industry had been a tour through a steel plant?
Ellory applied himself to the bellows, fo
r long tense hours. At his command, Sem Onger periodically fed charcoal blocks to the hissing fire. Heat began to radiate in withering blasts. Grimed, panting, muscles aching, Ellory kept pumping doggedly, watching red oxide cooking over the red-hot bottom of the clay pan.
Would the oxide never melt?
It did, finally. Ellory’s sagging spirit rose and he pumped with renewed vigor. He would succeed!
“1541 degrees Centigrade, Sem Onger!” he yelled above the roar of the fire. “Hotter than anything you’ve ever known, old man! Now throw charcoal and green wood, half of each, into the molten mixture.”
Sem Onger obeyed.
The charcoal burst into flame, performing its duty of reducing the oxide, extracting oxygen. The green wood spluttered, violently, throwing up a huge cloud of dense black smoke and steam, blanketing the open process so that oxygen in the air would not reverse the hard-won reduction. It was a crude method, but the only one possible.
Choking wretchedly from the smoke, Ellory continued pumping in a frenzy. Sem Onger reeled away, mumbling and gasping, but at Ellory’s hoarse shout he bravely plunged back throwing more charcoal fuel into the raging firepot.
How would he judge when the reduction was complete?
Ellory didn’t know, but when he saw a watery white-hot liquid bubbling at the edges of the pan, he took that as a sign. He had been pumping, choking, burning alive for ages, it seemed.
He staggered from the bellows and knocked the clay plug away from the melting pan with a long stick.
A tiny trickle of molten metal dripped down to a trough of wet sand, prepared beforehand. The trickle stopped and when, a while later, the wind had driven away the fumes and smoke from the dying fire, Ellory found a shapeless pig of iron lying in the sand mold.
It was about the size of his fist.
No more than a penny’s worth, in the Twentieth Century market, produced by the consumption of half a wagon load of charcoal and ore, and a full day of backbreaking labor!
But Ellory felt disappointment only for a moment.
“After all,” he told himself aloud, “this was the first try. And it’s the first bit of iron produced on Earth—outside of Antarka—in perhaps a thousand years!”
An age reborn!
A sense of what he had accomplished suddenly overwhelmed him. So some unknown genius must have felt, an age ago, when he stared at the lump of cooling iron in the world’s first crude smelting pot!
Yet this was different; his sense of triumph was immeasurably greater. For what could that unknown genius have guessed of the things Homer Ellory knew—the vast potentialities which lay in that shapeless little pig of metal?
Forgotten civilization had been built of the stuff; could be rebuilt from the patterns that existed in one man’s mind. Homer Ellory, he thought; planner and creator, builder of a new world.
Sem Onger was eyeing the cooling iron lump, wonderingly. Ellory had to pull him back before he reached to touch it.
“Truly, it is a miracle!” cackled the old seer.
He looked up at Ellory as if at a superbeing. And in that, too, Ellory had his reward. Soon, thousands and thousands of others would look at him that way—
He broke off such ruminations of personal conceit. He looked Sem Onger up and down, laughing. The old man was black from head to toe, his silvery hair sooty, his skin lobster red as though he had been parboiled.
“If you could see yourself!” The old scholar grinned back.
Ellory laughed weakly; then his knees buckled and he slumped to the grass beyond the firepot. He was fast asleep in seconds. Old Sem Onger sat down to hug his bony knees and rock back and forth, muttering aloud.
“When I was young, I tried it—and failed!” he confessed to himself. “But then, there was no one to tell me to use green wood.”
Chapter 10
VULCAN
A week later, the ring of steel on steel pealed out over the sylvan quiet of dead New York. The sound seemed to hasten out over the world, proclaiming to a metal-less civilization that Vulcan was reborn. Like Vulcan, Ellory was pounding joyfully with a metal hammer-head attached to a thick wooden handle. Under the blows, a long flat blade of iron took symmetrical shape. It rested on a block of iron serving as an anvil.
In that blade was destiny.
Ellory had fired the melting pot three more times, gaining experience, and producing more steel-like metal each time. Sand-molds had alternately formed the hammer-head, anvil block and blade.
The blade became a sword, after several hours of grinding with flint-hard stones.
Ellory leaped erect, whirling the heavy saber around his head. Reflected beams of sunlight stabbed in all directions, over scenes alien to the flash of new metal in the sun for centuries.
New, and crude—and beautiful!
“It will make a formidable weapon!” said Sem Onger in awed tones. “You have advanced warfare, Humrelly!”
Ellory stopped whirling the blade suddenly.
Advanced warfare…
Ironically, that was to be his first mark in this Stone Age era. Arming one tribe of warring people with a new and murderous weapon, to spill more blood among their enemies! Depressed at the thought, Ellory lowered the blade.
Would it be a wiser course, perhaps, to bury it, and all it represented?
“I know what you are thinking, Humrelly,” said Sem Onger sagely. “But you will make victory quicker to us. And thereby, more merciful. And the metal will serve peaceful arts of more consequence.”
Ellory grasped the old man’s shoulder, nodding. That was the way to look at it.
“Come on. Let’s show this to Jon Darm.”
He strode to their wagon. Within himself, he prayed that he had made the right decision. Or was he now, in one moment, twisting the fate of Fiftieth Century Earth into bloodier channels?
A clatter of hooves sounded before they had hitched their team. Sharina rode up on a white charger, her golden tresses blowing in the breeze. She dismounted gracefully.
Ellory realized he had missed her. Her simple beauty, lacking any true Stone Age crudeness, was more entrancing than the mental image of her he carried with him.
She smiled at him.
“I came down to see how you were, Humrelly—at my father’s request,” she said. “He wishes to know if all goes well.”
Ellory nodded and smiled. It was likely that Jon Darm, without Mal Radnor to influence him, had thought more highly of Ellory’s mysterious mission.
“What news of the war?” he asked in turn.
“Our forces have been driven back,” admitted the girl, frowning. “The enemy is powerful. But we will fight for a long time yet!”
“No!” contradicted Ellory. “The war will be over shortly, because of this!”
He held up the sword and explained.
Sharina was startled. But strangely, she also seemed unenthusiastic. Looking from one to the other, Sem Onger whispered in Ellory’s ear.
“When the war is over, she marries Mal Radnor. It is the custom for the chief’s daughter to marry her betrothed immediately after a war—if it is successful!”
So that was it.
Ellory looked at the sword he had forged. It would also forge certain human relationships into which he had been catapulted. And then, looking at the sweet-faced, silent girl next to him, he longed to suddenly take her in his arms, kiss her. He strained toward her once. But then it occurred to him that this would be wrong, by Twentieth or Fiftieth Century standards.
The girl gave him a faint stare of challenge, then swung lightly on her mount.
“I will hurry back and tell my father of what you have made,” she said. With a last curious stare at the sword, and at Ellory, she galloped away.
Sunk in a moody cloud as their wagon lumbe
red back toward the city, Ellory fingered the sword in his lap thoughtfully. Suddenly he pulled up the team of oxen, before a farmer’s thatched hut.
“See that horse in the field, Sem Onger?” Ellory pointed. “Get it for me. I’m off for the war!”
“What?”
“You heard me!” snapped Ellory. “I’ll demonstrate the superiority of a metal weapon personally. Mal Radnor—well, never mind. Get that horse for me.”
Sem Onger was blinking.
“You mean you’ll take part in a battle? But Humrelly, suppose—” He paused.
“Suppose I’m killed,” Ellory finished calmly. “All right. You know how to make steel now, without me. It will win the war, in any case.”
New blade, new destiny; and he must wield them both himself. He could see that now.
Sem Onger remonstrated no further, seeing the set lines of Ellory’s face. Promising the farmer he would be reimbursed in kind, the old seer had him bring the horse.
Ellory rode off with the animal’s hooves flying.
Sem Onger stared after him, slowly shaking his head, and grinning.
“Human nature, and the fire of youth, change little, though the centuries flow by,” he philosophized. “Mal Radnor had best watch his military laurels, as well as his bride!”
Chapter 11
THE SHINING STICK
With Sem Onger’s detailed directions ringing, in his ears, Ellory rode west to the broad Hudson. A sleepy boatman paddled him across without question in a flat-bottom scow, the horse swimming behind. On the other shore, Ellory followed the trail that led into cool woods.
Though a fair horseman, he soon found his bones aching.
This was not like leisurely cantering along prepared bridle paths of 20th-century parks. The trail was rough, dipping up and down. The horse, more suited to plow than open running, lumbered along heavily, shaking its rider.
Ellory began to repent his impulsive, almost rash resolve to join the war. Primitive as this battling might be he had not the slightest war experience. What good would he be, even with a sword? Why had he done this? But he could not rationalize that. It was all a mixture of reasons again, involving himself and these people.
