The slope was hard to climb, and the pebbles and gravel surface made walking difficult, so that it was some horns before we reached a saddle between two of the peaks. Before us lay a replica of the valley we had left, except that it was much wider.
Arab in nodded towards the peak on our left hand.
‘That’s the highest point for some miles around,” he said. “We shall cover a wider area from there.” And he set off, followed by the three of us, to climb the steep slope.
We were in no fit shape for mountaineering, and the thin air caught our lungs sharply. But we reached the top without other hindrance, and found ourselves looking into an ancient crater.
Karinga Varga shaded his eyes against the sun, and shouted suddenly, pointing to the deep shadow below us.
“It’s a building!” said Arabin, following the pointing finger.
We scrambled down the interior of the crater, slipping for long stretches on the loose scree and shingle that lined its walls, and at last reached the level surface round the inner edge of the crater, which was perhaps a mile or more across.
As we drew nearer, we saw that the building ahead of us was a massive but squat stone erection more like a fortress than a house. But who would build a fortress inside a crater?
We ran, as soon as the surface was level enough to allow running, towards the building. In the wall facing the small centre cone of the crater was a single tall door of stone, standing ajar.
Inside, all was blackness. We stood panting after our dash, drawing the thin air of Varang-Varang into our lungs, and as our eyes became accustomed to the darkness, we looked around us.
There was no sign of a window to brighten the dense gloom, and once more we lamented our lack of foresight in not bringing torches with us when we left the Disc on landing.
Our previous experience underground had made us timid of venturing further than we could see, and we stood hesitantly in the great doorway, talking in whispers. Then Arabin gave a great shout.
“Hallo-o-o there!” he called into the darkness, and back came the echo “ ’llo-o-o, ’llo-o-o” from the far wall of the building. Beside us, just inside the doorway, a faint metallic booming answered the shout, and we stretched out our hands to find a heavy bell hanging there.
We explored its contours with our hands, and found it to be a massive hollow cube of some metal, with rounded edges. An embossed strip ran round the flat surface in both directions, up and down. We crouched beneath the bell, but found no clapper. Karim tested it by rapping upon it and his knuckles, first from the outside and then from the inside, but all he got was a deep, faint booming sound, and a pair of badly grazed knuckles. Then he slipped beneath it and we could hear his hands scraping round the inside.
The next instant we were violently startled to hear a diabolical roar from the bell. Karim ducked frantically out and was outside in the pale sunshine in a split second. Truth to tell, we were as startled as he was, and were not far behind him in his rush.
And as we stood there debating whether to fly, we heard a colossal echo ring through the crater—“Nothing inside the bell —the bell—the bell...!”
Karim stood with his mouth agape. “That is me talking inside the bell-” he said. “My voice—and still it calls!” And
still indeed, it did call, as from the crags of the crater echoed. “Inside the bell—the bell—the bell!”
“The perfect loud hailer!” commented Arabin. “Just stand inside that thing and the whole world hears what you whisper!” He paused, thoughtful. “The whole world . . . Let’s try it! You’ve got the most powerful voice, Casimir—back you go, and this time SHOUT!”
Karim, already scared by the awful din he had raised, needed much persuasion, but after diplomacy and flattery, he at last crept beneath the great bell. Almost at once came the hellish roar: “What shall I shout, Leo; . . . shout, Leo . . . shout...”
When the echoes had died away, Leo bent to the rim of the bell: “Was that a shout?” he asked.
“No-o-o!” came the deafening answer. “I am yet only talking quietly!”
“Does the echo trouble you in there, Karim?” Leo asked, after a pause of perhaps a minute, to allow the echo to die.
“Not the echo—the echo—the echo ... I am sounding to myself pretty loud, but no trouble from the echo, thank you.”
Arabin motioned with his head. “We’d better stand well away when he does shout,” he said. Then, to Karim, he suggested: “Casimir—give us thirty seconds to get away from this thing, and then call something simple. This echo will confuse anyone who hears it—if they hear it—so make it easy to understand. Better try and give a location. Shout ‘Mountain’ and then, when the echo’s gone, call ‘Crater’. Repeat that twice, and then we’ll come back. Right—we’re off now. Give us thirty seconds, and then SHOUT.”
We had scarcely managed to reach the other side of the building and take shelter from the worst of the echo, when we heard Karim’s shattering bellow, multiplied a hundred-fold by the strange acoustics of the bell. A minute or so later came his second shout, and the rocks rang with a deafening “Crater! Crater! Crater!”
We waited for the repetition, our hands over our ears and our heads bent against the terrific waves of sound. Then, when they had dwindled into a thousand hoarse echoes, we ran back to the entrance of the building, where we met Karim, a broad smile of gratification on his face.
“Was it good—my big noise?” he asked.
“Most melodious, Casimir,” Leo assured him. “If there’s anyone within twenty miles they heard that all right!”
Karinga Varga nudged me while Arabin was speaking. “The sun,” he said. “It has moved found the sky.” And he pointed with his finger to trace its course.
It had indeed moved, and was now directly behind us.
“How long do you suppose a day lasts here?” I asked.
“A few hours—no more,” answered the Virian. “I have seen another world like this, that spins quickly—a little world, out beyond Moroc-Dor”—he gave the Virian name for Saturn— “where nothing lives. I have seen it from the Nagani Discs. It spins madly round in perhaps four hours. Varang-Varang was not always like this. Maybe her flight from her appointed place has caused this disturbed spin, as it has caused her to lose her moons.”
The rapidly waning day reminded us that we had not yet found food. We debated whether to run the risk of entering the great blind building, and decided that we would sleep there in the wide doorway when night came, but would not enter the place yet. In the meantime, we hurriedly separated and searched the crater for some sign of edible vegetation. Karinga Varga and Arabin set off in one direction and Karim and I in the other, with the intention of circling the crater and meeting beyond the small cone of the inner crater.
It was half an hour by the time we reached our meeting place, and already a thick dusk had fallen. But there was good news from Karinga Varga, who had found a considerable crop of the fungus such as he and Karim had eaten in the tunnels. It was repulsive stuff, but both he and Karim did not hesitate to show that it was edible. As we walked back to the deserted building, we chewed the leathery fungus—which was not unlike Terrestrial mushrooms—and congratulated ourselves on at least having found something to appease our hunger. There was a certain oozy moisture in the fungus that quenched our thirst to some extent, and we thought that if Karim and Karinga Varga had lived on it for, at least, a number of days, we could do the same.
We reached the great square doorway of the fortress (as we were already calling it) with some difficulty, for night had fallen before we were half-way back.
As we did not know what life-forms—besides that which we had seen underground—existed on Varang-Varang, we took it in turns to rest, two sleeping, or attempting to sleep, while the other two watched.
It was while Arabin and I were watching that we heard a sound that made us sit up rigid with attention. Somewhere in the blackness of the building there sounded the small, unmistakeable sound of the co
ming of the bat-creature—the minute thunderclap we had come to recognise in the temple.
We shook the other two gently. “Bat-man’s back again!” whispered Leo. They rose quickly, and we stood with our backs to the stone wall to await the creature’s coming.
In no more than a few seconds we heard its voice echoing inside the building. “Men!” it called.
We remained silent, and heard the voice draw nearer.
“If you now wish,” it called, “we will speak with you.”
If we could believe what the creature had told us when it spoke in the temple, it could see us even in the dark, so there was little purpose in trying to remain hidden. Arabin answered the voice.
“We will speak with you here,” he said.
From almost beside us the voice, quieter now, responded. “What we have to say to you may be long,” it said. “We may talk here now, but not when the sun comes . . . You will be safe inside this house..
“No!” said Arabin, with decision.
There was silence for some moments.
“We will speak here, then, for as long as we may . .. You spoke of helping us... ?”
“If we can help,” Arabin said.
“Who knows whether anyone can help us? But we have not long before the sun returns. There is much to tell. .. We heard your call from the bell, and came when the darkness came. We are all here.”
“Ten of you?” I asked.
“I do not yet know whether we are ten, as you call it. We are as many as you and as many again.”
“Eight of them, then,” whispered Leo. “Must have four fingers on each hand...”
Then he continued, aloud, “Tell us who you are, and why there are no more than eight.”
“We are all that remain of our race,” the creature replied. “Once there were many, many more—as many as the stones of this world—but all are gone and we remain. The Wise Ones made it so...”
“Who are the Wise Ones?”
“The Wise Ones are they who are not to be seen. They left us, when they brought the sun back to us. What you call darkness is our life. They made the light return to our world, and tore away the curtain they had set against the light. They threw our world to the sun..
Leo halted the creature while he spoke to Karinga Varga.
“Karinga Varga: do you understand this talk?” he asked.
“I think so, Leo Arabin. Varang-Varang has been invisible to us for many hundreds of years. I think the Wise Ones may have devised some screen round this world, which brought darkness and hid it from men. The Wise Ones are they who are everywhere, even on Varang-Varang—but now they have left. It is evil when the Wise Ones leave a world. I have lived in such a world—the world of Hafna, which you call Vulcan. The Wise Ones abandoned it, as they have abandoned this world.”
“And these creatures here, Karinga Varga, they are . . . ?”
The Virian answered, as I feared—“Yes, Leo Arabin, these bat-creatures are the Beast-Men of Varang Varang.”
X
I had suspected that the bat-creatures might be the legendary Beast-Men of Varang-Varang, but apart from some personal revulsion we felt little fear of them. We had heard the age-old stories the Virians told of the Beast-Men, and I suppose we had imagined some form of creature that was formidable. But these bat-like beings were even more formidable than we had pictured. They were monstrous, fearsome things, and inspired the kind of distaste that some reptiles arouse.
Their wing-spread was something like twenty feet, and they themselves stood perhaps eight feet tall or more. Their physical shape was much like that of humans, but a distortion of the breast-bone, and some attrition of the lower body—where the pelvis would have been in a human—stamped them as being alien to our own race. Their feet were equipped with great claws—the most fearsome part of their whole anatomy—and similar claws, or rather hook-like hand appendages, grew from the first joint of the wings.
Their heads were small, in comparison with their stature, and were longer in proportion than one would have expected. The faces, though, were almost completely alien, although they carried lidded eyes, nostrils, and a wide, fringed mouth. The features were there, but how distorted they were!
I learn now that their bone structure was different from that of humans, the bones being larger, but fewer in number and lighter.
Of course, it is easy to write dispassionately about the batmen now, but then it was much different, situated as we were that night on Varang-Varang.
We squatted on the dusty floor and leaned against the ancient hewn stone wall of the building’s porchway as they spoke to us. Outside was the black night, sharply, bitterly cold, with the stars wheeling overhead as the planet spun on its dizzily accelerated rotation. And on the horizon, as we had seen it the previous night, was a great gleaming pearl that we did not recognise.
Inside the stark, lightless building, we gathered the eight survivors of the bat-creatures’ race. We could not see them, but from time to time, during the silences that occurred frequently, we heard the harsh rustle of their wings.
There was something infinitely pathetic about the situation, despite the revulsion we felt for their alien life-form. Once before, though, some of us had experienced a similar sympathy— for the plant-like Vulcanids who had menaced the whole human race, or what remained of it.
And so we tried to temper our sympathy with mistrust, and we tried to discredit the story we heard. But in the end they convinced us.
Throughout the four or five hours of the short night they spoke, in turn, and in that time we heard a story that dipped down into the remote past of the Solar System.
Their race, they told us, had evolved on Varang-Varang, and so, on reaching intellectual maturity, they had come to look upon that planet as their own. From other worlds had come travellers at different stages of their history, and for many ages the bat-creatures had mercilessly preyed upon such visitors.
It was a tale that has been told many times on Earth—the story of the holding race, mistrusting all strangers, who held their land by cunning and force, and by spreading a legend of terror among their neighbours at last secured it against even the thought of invasion by others. So evil had become the reputation of the ferocious inhabitants of Varang-Varang, that at last the planet had been outlawed, as it were, by other worlds that held the secret of travelling among the worlds of the Solar System.
Their own travels had never taken them off their own planet, and later members of their race had at last begun to doubt the wisdom of the early policy of slaughtering all strangers. The bat-men themselves had little theoretical science wherewith to found a culture that might expand beyond Varang-Varang’s own frontier. They had a sound knowledge of many arts and crafts, and we learned that the building in which we then sheltered from the bitterly cold night had been erected by their forefathers many of our centuries before. (It was almost impossible for us to estimate their descriptions of periods of time, so we found it hard to distinguish between decades and centuries, by our own understanding. We then knew neither the rotatory period of their planet in its old orbit, nor even the average life of the bat-race, and so could not assess the time-value of their years, nor their life-cycles. Therefore, many of our appraisals of periods of their time may be widely out, but we did succeed in establishing in our minds the idea of many thousands of our years that covered the story of the bat-creatures.)
From Karinga Varga, who questioned them about the slaughter of his racial hero, Han Dralmi, we received the news that in their minds they regarded this as no more than one incident among many in their murderous career.
Karinga Varga also questioned the bat-creatures about the cloak of invisibility that had covered their world for so many centuries. This brought them to the key-point in their story— the intervention of “The Wise Ones.”
The Wise Ones, they told us, came to Varang-Varang after a long period of that world’s quiescence. For many ages, the bat-men’s world had been shunned by those races who knew
of them. And then had come the Wise Ones, silently at first, and unseen. They had dwelt on Varang-Varang for many life-times of the bat-men, without their presence being known. Then, a particularly long and exhausting inter-racial war had been brought to an end by the intervention of the Wise Ones. The manner of their peace-making brought for us a sudden shocked thrill.
In the course of a protracted battle, fought at close quarters by the contending sides, all the participants had quite suddenly been annihilated by a cataclysmic explosion.
In describing it, the bat-creature speaking to us likened the explosion to that of a bursting mountain—a volcano. And the whole of that land, for many life-times after, carried an enduring but unseen fire in every grain of dust.
“So,” breathed Arabin thoughtfully, “we weren’t the first with the atom bomb . . .”
After this first display of their power, the Wise Ones had disclosed their presence to the Beast-Man, although they were never seen by them. This, we thought, may have been due to some factor in the bat-creatures’ sight which blinded them to certain radiations, while opening their eyes to others—as witness their power to see in what we called “darkness.”
The Wise Ones had spoken and had warned. The contempt in which they held the Beast-Men was made plain. There must be an end to slaughter, they indicated. If not—then the whole of the Beast-Men’s race would be destroyed as their contending warriors had been destroyed.
There had followed a long age of peace—in practice, if not in theory, for the bat-creatures still retained their warring instincts. The Wise Ones had given them some understanding of scientific matters, with the promise—conditional upon a peaceful future—that the secrets of space travel would in time be revealed to them.
The prospect had held the bat-men in outward peace, but inwardly they only awaited the time when they could leave their own world and carry on their bloodthirsty wars with other worlds.
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