Children of the Void

by William Dexter

  Once or twice one of them would hesitantly dither, and then stop. But it was near the end of the line of specimens that they showed greatly increased activity.

  The label on the bottle from which we had taken this particular powder simply said “Red Fire.”

  Ducrot hurriedly went in search of an encyclopedia. Meanwhile, the Esoes clattered briskly around the little heap of powder and Karim’s boulder.

  A few moments later Ducrot returned, thumbing over the pages of his encyclopedia.

  We stood round him while he ran a finger down the columns headed “Pyrotechnics.” Then the finger stopped, and he read closely.

  He turned to us, suddenly pale. “One of the substances used for making ‘Red Fire,’ ” he said slowly, “is thorium.”

  Throughout man’s history, each age has been able to arouse terror by a single word. The words have varied from year to year. Plague, Bonaparte, Unemployment, Hitler, Hydrogen-bomb—all these have played their part as tokens of terror. We, too, had such a word—Thorium.

  For it was the Vogel thorium bomb’s premature explosion that had demolished humanity on Earth back in 1973, when we ourselves had been captives on the planet Vulcan. True, we owed to this catastrophe our return to Earth, but it was only chance that had ruled that we should find Earth habitable. For all our captors, the Vulcanids, had known, we—the guinea-pigs—might have been destroyed at the instant we were thrust through the air-locks of the Disc that had brought us back.

  So when we learned that we had thorium before us in Ducrot’s laboratory, we felt the old terror return, the terror that told us man was not indestructible, the terror we had experienced in finding ourselves alone on a dead world.

  We first sought out the Nagani, having complete faith in their ancient, alien wisdom.

  And then we realised that these creatures from another world had shown not the slightest interest in the arrival among us of the bat-men and their Esoes.

  So far, we and the Nagani had travelled parallel roads. We held a common aim, and had lived side by side in harmony and completeness. We had even accustomed ourselves to-the grotesque appearance of the small, almost reptilian creatures alongside whom we lived. Now we saw the immeasurable gulf that separated our two races, and it was the bat-men’s presence that revealed it to us.

  The Nagani had always been ready to meet us and discuss matters that would help them to share our globe with us. They had even, in latter days, contrived a mechanical interpreter, for they themselves have no vocal speech, and the idea of writing seems completely alien to them. Hitherto, we had been confined to interpreting each other’s thoughts by the elaborate electronic device we had named the telementor system, but this was too prone to misinterpretation. It had no constant standard, but rather showed each person who used it his own pattern of thought aroused as a reaction to the thoughts of others.

  Now the Nagani had prepared something more efficient— a device which promised to be a nearly perfect link between their system of thought and ours. It was this device that revealed more accurately the variation in Nagani thought-processes and our own.

  Each of our people had helped in the construction and preparation of the Nagani mechanical interpreter, by recording vocabularies in their own language. It had been a long, patient task, but at each test we saw that the Nagani “talker” was nearing perfection.

  It was an amazing piece of apparatus they had devised, but even more amazing would have been their failure to make something of the kind. I truly think that there was no physical limit to their incredible ingenuity, and, but for one division of thought that lay between them and us, they could have solved our problems in a fraction of the time . . . But this theorising is anticipatory, and further reasoning must wait.

  When we summoned them, they answered our call at once, and willingly agreed to operate the almost completed “talker” instead of conducting the conference with their telementor equipment.

  They had assembled their mechanism in what had once been the Cumberland Hotel at Marble Arch, where we found the entire first floor filled with a vast web of complex wiring that linked suite after suite, room after room, into one vast bank of equipment.

  We sat in the main lounge and awaited the arrival of the Nagani. I thought—with a wave of nostalgia for the days that were gone—of the last time I had been in that great rambling caravanserai. It had been—how many years ago?—at the time when Vogel’s experiments had begun to alarm Britain, and I had talked there with Sir Peter Skinner, the Midlands atomic expert. For two hours we had talked, and I had come away completely instructed on the breeding of dachshunds, but with not a word from the stocky, alert little man on the subject of atomics. The voluble little scientist had been only too ready to talk about his hobby, but never a clue could be drawn from him as to how science viewed the Vogel experiments.

  Would it be like that now? I wondered. Would the Nagani procrastinate?

  It was bizarre to see the alterations they had made there to accommodate their own needs. Chairs and tables, stairs and light switches, everything had been scaled down in dimensions to suit their thirty-inch stature. The peculiar musky odour we had long come to associate with their presence pervaded the place, and it was almost comical to see two short, gleaming figures positively guarding the doorways and the foot of the great staircase, where once Messrs. J. Lyons stalwart attendants had held pride of place.

  When the interview came at last, we spoke into stand microphones and their replies came through tiny loudspeakers fitted below the microphones.

  They heard our news of the bat-creatures’ interest in our thorium discovery without apparent interest—certainly without comment.

  “Why do the bat-men need thorium?” asked Arabin. “It was thorium that killed the rest of our people before we returned to Earth ten years and more ago. Is there danger of another such catastrophe?”

  The loudspeakers were silent for a moment, and then the reply came. It was an unearthly experience to hear the words, which had been spoken at different times by different voices and stored in the “memory-bank” of their great web of equipment. Sometimes a man’s voice would alternate with a woman’s; at others a Nagani operator would make a wrong connection and a torrent of meaningless sounds would pour forth; then perhaps a foreign word or sentence might creep in. But at last an intelligible reply came through the apparatus.

  “If there is danger, it will be danger built by the hands of men,” the machine replied cryptically.

  Other questions were answered equally enigmatically, until Arabin asked in despair: “Do you know that the bat-creatures from Varang-Varang are here on Earth with us, and that they seek this mineral of ours?”

  The machine answered: “Yes. We know the bat-men. We have known them for thousands of years. They were evil. We would have no commerce with them. Now—we do not know. It is not for us to interfere in the affairs of men.” “Why not?” asked Arabin, loudly and bluntly.

  “The bat-men are alien to you, as we are alien to you,” came the halting, mechanical voice. “They have their needs, as we have ours. Who should question them? They have been evil, but perhaps not evil by their own standards. Now they have come here with men. It is men’s task to solve this problem. We must not try to change this thing ... It is not of our seeking.”

  “It’s not of our seeking, either,” responded Arabin grimly. Then he brightened, and with added urgency, demanded: “You must help us with this. We believe that the Nagani are wiser than we in this matter of commerce between races. We need your help ...”

  “No. It is not ours to give.” The strange mixture of words and voices that made up the machine’s vocabulary may have been responsible for confusion sometimes, but this last ultimatum left no doubts in our minds.

  However, we sat in that great lounge and argued—literally argued—with that machine. At times we forgot that we were arguing with the stolid little Nagani who sat alongside and around us, heads enwrapped in the equivalent of our microphones and speake
rs. We talked at the machine, raised our voices to it, pleaded—and all the time the Nagani sat quietly, undemonstratively, as though they had not heard or understood us.

  But there was no satisfaction to be had from the machine, or, through it, from the Nagani. Whatever our argument, the machine answered us with one phrase, and told us that we were all—human, Nagani, bat-men and all—“Children of the Void,” and that each race had its own share in coping with the problems of its own life.

  One result we did achieve, though. We urged the Nagani to construct an infra-red viewing device for us, so that we might observe the bat-creatures in their everlasting darkness. So far, only four of us had caught the briefest glimpse of one of them, and we had every reason to believe that they would still shun the light that was so unbearable to them. Their powers of teleportation could remove them from a lighted room immediately, but would they suffer from, or be aware of, infra-red light?

  The question was not long unanswered. The Nagani televisor equipment was adapted for projecting infra-red radiations on a low scale into our darkened room at the laboratory, and within an hour of its construction, we summoned the bat-men.

  At that time, when every least bit of detail could be a valuable clue to us, we sought every means possible of extending our knowledge of the creatures from Varang-Varang. We believed that if we could but observe them and check their reactions—if any—we might at least obtain some guidance as to the placing of further trust in them.

  We sat in darkness there, Ducrot with his hand on the rheostat that would gradually blend infra-red radiation with our darkness.

  There was the customary detonation, and we sat for a while before Ducrot turned his switch.

  “Is this what you seek?” asked Arabin, and I guessed that he was holding out the beaker containing the thorium grains.

  “We do not yet know,” the bat-man answered slowly. It seemed that he spoke with a distinct trace of emotion this time —a trait we had never before observed in these creatures. “But our senses tell us that you now have something that could be ... that which we seek.”

  “What will you do with this thing when you find it?” asked Leo.

  It was then that Ducrot turned the switch. Slowly, slowly, the screen on the further wall began to glow. Now the image on it showed in dark red. By degrees it became brighter, until we saw pictured on the screen the gigantic form of the batman.

  He was beginning to answer our question, when we saw on the screen that he was turning his head in a puzzled manner.

  “There is something here that prevents my eyes from seeing,” he whispered. And we saw him gather his great wings about him so that the hook-like hands could cover his eyes— great, goggle eyes that would have terrified anyone less accustomed to horrors.

  He turned his head this way and that in bafflement.

  “It is harmless,” soothed Ducrot. “We can see you now, although there is no light. . . Will you tell us why you seek this thing, and what you will do with it when you find it?”

  The bat-man, towering high above us as we could now see, stood with his head drooped in the shadow of his leathery wings. It was some time before he spoke, and then he said: “I cannot tell. It was not given to us to know ... We were commanded to find this thing. We must find it. . . the Wise Ones ordered it so.”

  To my surprise, Arabin nodded his head slowly (he showed up plainly in the screen) and whispered: “We, too, know that we must find it.”

  He turned to me, as I sat beside him.

  “I don’t know how you feel about this, Denis,” he said. “I’ve said nothing before to anyone, yet I feel a compulsion about this thing. I hate to be thought any sort of a crank— but I do feel that we’ve got to find this thing, whatever it may be. How do you feel about it?”

  I confessed that I, too, had felt a certain pressure to continue with the bat-creatures’ quest. In my case, I had kept the thought to myself, believing it to be founded on that absurd pity I had felt for the Vulcanids years before. I told Arabin so.

  “No,” he said. “You were probably alone in pitying the Vulcanids, Denis, but you’re not on your own in thinking like this now. I feel that what we’re involved in is something tremendous—something that goes right down to the roots of existence and purpose.”

  There was a murmur of agreement, and suddenly my mind was flooded with great relief, a sense of assuredness, as I realised that the others felt the same as Arabin and I did.

  I was watching the bat-man in the screen all this time, and he stood in that same posture of abject misery in which the unseen illumination had caught him. The anguish of ages sat there upon him, and, alien and revolting though his form was, it was impossible to avoid compassion for him and his blighted race.

  He raised his head as Arabin spoke. Sympathetic though I felt, I had to look away to avoid the ghastly mockery of a human face that I saw.

  “We will continue with this quest,” said Arabin. “I will say one thing, though, before we continue.

  “Your own race is doomed. Of a great and powerful people, only eight of you survive. That is because some of your people destroyed the rest. We believe that this knowledge is a terrible punishment to you who remain. If this quest of yours should end our race—as it well may—the Beast-Men of Varang-Varang will have exterminated yet another people. Somewhere —someone or something will remember this of the creatures of Varang-Varang: that they were killers, and nothing better. All memory of them will be erased from the Cosmic sum of knowledge.”

  “We know this,” murmured the bat-man. “And yet—we must still seek, and have help to seek . . .”

  XV

  There was something uncanny in the way our little population resolved to lead the search for the bat-men’s talisman. Not more than a dozen of us had communed with the strange creatures, so it could not be said that the bat-men exercised any hypnotic influence over the whole population. Some deep basic motive in every one of us told us that the end of the search would be rewarding—superbly rewarding—and so we gave all our resources to tracing the country’s scant supplies of thorium.

  After some research into the subject, and experimenting with the various small quantities we managed to secure, we decided that we had found neither the critical quantity nor the necessary purity of the mineral. We scoured larger and even larger areas in our search. At one time, even, we thought about making the journey to Brazil where, we read, the rare earth had at one time been found in comparative plenty.

  How we eventually found the critical quantity is worth the recounting, although I am anxious not to prolong this part of my narrative unduly, for I have to tell of vastly more important matters.

  Most of our search parties had worked to a system, going over territory where we believed that radio-active materials in general, and thorium in particular, might be stored.

  But occasionally a party would make something of a holiday of it, and would simply cruise round any area that took their fancy, entering buildings of all descriptions, and checking with either a scintillometer or the more familiar Geiger counter. We had done surprisingly little of this haphazard exploring since the Return in 1974, and now the bodies of victims of the great cataclysm had crumbled to dust, we felt fewer scruples about disturbing them in the surroundings where a catastrophe had overtaken them.

  I was with the party which at last found the clue to a great unsuspected store of radio-active minerals. With Harry Crow Eyes, the Blackfoot Indian, and Karim, I was driving from what had proved a false lead, when we came upon something odd.

  We had somehow missed our way in the maze of streets and squares around Earls Court and were cruising slowly round, taking our time, and looking for some landmark. As we turned the corner into one dust-carpeted street we saw a group of rusting fire-engines clustered outside one of the houses. The road was completely blocked by them, and we saw that some of the neighbouring houses had been badly burned.

  The blaze must have been extinguished almost immediately before the ultr
a-sonic effects of the Vogel thorium bomb reached London, for the engines had not had time to get away before their crews, and all the by-standers, were destroyed.

  A few tattered rags fluttering on railings, where they had lodged during the winds and storms of years, were all that remained of the victims who had been there.

  I pulled up, and we climbed slowly out of the jeep. We stood silently and looked at the dead drama that had been played out there so long ago. Heaped against the wheels of the fire-engines were drifts of dust, and occasional eddies of wind stirred them and floated the dust high overhead in a grey haze. The vehicles still stood there in their proud shining red paint, with only here and there a patch of rust on them. From one of them a long escape ladder probed out skyward to the parapet of one of the houses.

  Then Harry Crow Eyes pointed to the house wall.

  “Hey! Now look at that!” he exclaimed. “Ten bucks say that fire was started a-purpose. See what some guy wrote up there?”

  And in fading chalk on a sheltered part of the house wall we read: “The Vogel men must go . . . Send the Vogel men back to Mexico . . . Rally Tuesday at Hyde Park to send . . .

  We looked up at the house, shading our eyes against the long rays of the evening sun.

  “Commies. The Commies wrote that,” went on Harry. “See: it says ‘Rally Hyde Park.’ Remember how they used to go around chalking up ‘Rally’ notices? And who rallied? Only the guys that went around with the bits of chalk. I guess when they were kids they used to chalk ‘Teacher is a fool.’ Then when they got a bit older they’d take a purple pencil and take a good lick at it, and then write up a few of those anatomical inscriptions we still find on walls.”

  He spat into the dust.

  “If it hadn’t been for crackpots like them in the old days,” he muttered, “nobody’d have thought it worth while to putter around with atom bombs and thorium bombs. Might have got somewhere by now, instead of . . . this.” And he stirred the thick dust with his boot.