Inside, we found a document addressed to me by name, which instructed me to start immediately on the task of setting down on paper the history of our Return. It called upon me as "First Terrestrial Archivist" to continue this work until the "guidance" I was to receive should end.
Well, those who have read so far know that I complied unquestioningly. They know, too, that — apparently with some remnants of newspaper training battling with the Intelligences that guided my hand — I persuaded Arabin to write his share.
The document written by Krill Hvensor was already completed in the package, and this I inserted in its proper place in my narrative.
In four days, Krill Hvensor had told us, he would return, and I was sure that he would keep his word.
We thereupon set about the immediate task of creating a record of events, as we had been ordered, and three days were taken up in the work.
We occupied ourselves almost blindly with the writing of this account. There had been no arrangements made for our subsistence, and we had no thought of the necessity for food. Arabin and I carried out the actual work of writing this record, while Karim and Thomas Ludlam stood by patiently. At night we slept when the sun set. During the day we wrote and wrote and wrote.
By the afternoon of the third day I had written the last words of this "guided" account. As I drew the paper out of the type-writer — for the building where we worked had been used as an office, as I shall presently tell — I set it on top of the other sheets and sat back.
What was I to do now? I wondered. I supposed, vaguely, that I should soon know. I moved away to the french windows of the room where we had been working — it had been the Mayor's parlour, we found later — and looked out. Krill Hvensor would return on the morrow. Doubtless by then I should have more idea of my work.
As I stood there, Thomas Ludlam touched my sleeve.
"All finished?" he asked.
I nodded. "All finished to date, Thomas," I replied.
"Then you and I and Leo and Casimir must now speak together," he said, with an air of urgency that seemed new to his placid nature.
He drew me through the french windows to a table that Leo had set out on what had been the lawn.
There, he and Karim were sitting idly, as unlike two men returned to Earth from the fabulous distances of space as could be conceived.
We sat down with them.
"Well, Thomas, old friend?" said Leo, questionably. "How now? No chess, here, old boy — though that will no doubt be rectified later."
Thomas drew his chair closer, and gripped Arabin by the arm. He shook his head sadly. "Even here — at this distance — they can reach you," he said.
"Of course they can," replied Arabin, dreamily. "We're never out of their reach..."
Then he shook his head, as a man does who is trying to make a tremendous effort of will.
Thomas nodded excitedly. "That's it!" he urged. "They can't reach you if only you demand of your will that you should be the master!"
Arabin dropped his head on his outstretched arms with a gesture of despair.
Thomas shook him violently, then threw up his hands to his head. He walked up and down quickly, obviously under the spell of some overpowering emotion. I can see the commanding reason for his despair now, but at the time I accepted everything as part of a fore-ordained scheme of things.
Casimir sat with his head down, taking no part in all this.
"You, Denis, I can at least talk to you," Thomas pleaded. "You are the newest of their victims. I am the oldest. I know them... and I know how to beat them. You shall listen to me."
Somewhere at the back of my mind, a tiny voice kept telling me that Thomas was mad. But yet, I was beginning to reason, I must hear him. He apparently saw my divided loyalty to the damnable Intelligences ruling me, for he seized my arm in a viciously tight grip.
"You will listen to me — you must hear me. And you must understand and believe me," he commanded.
"Listen, Denis. Can you not see that these two" — he waved a hand towards Leo and Casimir — "that these two are not their own masters? You yourself are not your own master — are you?"
Then I began to appreciate the truth of what he was saying to me. I understood at once that we, men returned from the dead to a world of the dead, had acted like robots in obeying our orders. We had not even troubled ourselves with the elementary necessities of life. We had walked out of the Disc into a world that, for all we knew, might poison us with the first breath of its atmosphere; we had accepted the fact that if we must die, we must; we had been unquestioning, unreasoning machines.
And still, all the time, that compelling voice told me that Thomas was mad, that he was not to be believed, that The Voice was the only truth.
Thomas was talking to me, talking hurriedly and urgently.
I made a great effort. What was he telling me?
"You are the newest... their influence can't have reached the depths with you that it has with Leo and Casimir... Listen!"
I found myself sitting down on a park bench beside him. I read on the small metal inscription screwed to the back of the bench that it had been "Donated (dreadful word!) by Alderman H. J. Possett in commemoration of..."
Thomas dragged my attention away from the trivial detail.
"Nod your head if you hear and understand me," he said. I nodded, but the effort was appalling. That voice' was now rising to a thin scream in my ears, that tiny, silent voice in my own mind.
"I've been living on that other world for nearly all my life," Thomas was telling me, and I heard his Voice coming to me thinly through the shimmering veil of yet more whispers in my mind's ear.
"They are diabolical, ruthless beings, those Vulcanids," he went on. "I know them... I learned their secret long ago... Now they want our world, now that their own is dying... your world. Will you give it up to them so easily?"
The commanding voice in my mind was now a roar of many voices, and Thomas seemed to be
speaking to me from a great distance. Still, his words came through that frightful barrage.
With an effort, I formed words to answer him. Something told me that I could confute his story so easily.
I must have whispered, for Thomas had to bend his head to hear me.
"Krill Hvensor is no diabolical, ruthless being," I managed to say, and the voices in my head seemed to be applauding me, praising me.
"Krill Hvensor," Thomas declared, "is no Vulcanid".
In my mind arose a great conflict. My will told me that Thomas spoke the truth, but the host of voices that only I heard roared a denial.
Then, with the unintelligible confusion of mind such as comes to a man under an anaesthetic, I lost consciousness.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When I awoke, it was dark. Somewhere above my head a tiny light glimmered.
I lay awhile lazily, wondering whether to turn over and sleep again. Then I saw a figure stooping over me, and the light shone on Thomas's gleaming bald pate.
"Awake?" he breathed.
Back to my mind came my last sight of him, and the memory of what he had been trying to tell me. I sat up at once. I felt inexpressibly refreshed, and my head was now clear as it had not been for literally years.
"Krill Hvensor," I said. "You were telling me that he was no Vulcanid..."
Thomas lifted the candle — a candle! How long since I had seen such a homely object? — and placed it on the floor between us.
"That is the truth," he said solemnly. "Krill Hvensor is no Vulcanid. The true Vulcanids have been seen by no Terrestrial — save one. I have seen them. I know them. They are evil — the embodiment of everything foul."
Then I heard the story of this brave old man, who had lived out nearly two hundred of our years on an alien world, hoping every moment that some day he might help to save humanity from the mind-stealing scourge of the Masters of Hafna.
All I had been taught on that world was now shown to be false. My mind had been cunningly filled with the desirable p
ropaganda fostered by the Intelligences ruling all of us. Krill Hvensor and his kind, I now heard — and I believed it, so urgent was Thomas Ludlam in the telling of it — were members of a race inhabiting yet another world, who had been taken into captivity by the Vulcanids countless years ago.
Their own world had been left lifeless, as it had been found of no use to the Vulcanid Rulers. Its people had been subjugated and had lived as semi-robots on Vulcan. They had acted as the mobile
intelligences of the Masters, and had carried out their bidding unquestioningly. They had scoured the Solar System for the new home planned by the true Vulcanids; they had sojourned on one planet and then another in the aeon-long search.
"Then — Krill Hvensor is not a mutation from some alien species?" I asked.
"Krill Hvensor and his kind are as they always have been." Thomas assured me. "They inhabit the shape that was given to them by God, but their wills are the wills of the Vulcanids. At least — that has been the case, but now, a change has been brought about.
"During the last generation, they have been made aware of their plight. And now they have elected to leave their Masters — if they can.
"In a few hours — for it will be dawn shortly — Krill Hvensor will be leading the first of his kind to their new home. This world of ours is to be theirs, and they will be sharing it with us and those members of the Terrestrial Colony they are able to bring with them."
I pictured a vast armada of Discs descending upon our little patch of public park, bearing the eight hundred members of the Colony, and heaven knew how many of Krill Hvensor's race. Thomas, however, corrected me.
"We don't know — we can have no idea — how many will come," he said. "It may even be that not a single Disc will arrive. This I do know: when we left the Vulcanid base on the Moon, there were more than five hundred Discs ready to depart, and standing by them were nearly a thousand of Krill Hvensor's people."
"But — the people from the Terrestrial Colony — our people," I said. "Casimir's wife — all those poor souls trapped out there on Vulcan — how are they to return?"
"No need to worry," Thomas replied. "Part of the original plan by the Masters of Hafna involved the sending of at least half the Colony a few days after our arrival. The rest — well, they are the unlucky ones. They will remain on Vulcan... But... they are the old ones. They have not many more years of life, in any case. Oh! I know it sounds callous, but believe me, I would gladly have stayed myself if just one other could have returned."
"Even now, it is probable that three or four hundred of our people will be embarked on the Discs ready to return. But I fear that few of them will reach us. The Intelligences must by now be aware of the plan to desert them. They will contrive to destroy many of the Discs out in space."
It was a terrible thought. But, looking at things in an objective light, I realised that we should triumph if only a few dozen humans returned. In ages to come the Earth would be repopulated...
Thomas interrupted my train of thought.
"Time is so short," he urged. "In a few hours, if they are to come at all, the first Discs will be here. We must arouse Leo and Casimir and break this damned hold the Vulcanids have over them. Now that there are two of us, I am hopeful. We shall — we must — make their minds their own again, if that is impossible, only one thing remains: we must destroy them utterly."
I was horrified, but Thomas waved away my objections.
"We cannot have any human's mind ruled by the Vulcanids," he pointed out, logically enough.
"Otherwise, we shall lose what we have already won, and the Vulcanids will take over this world eventually."
We sought out Leo and Casimir. Casimir would be the easier of the two, we agreed, and we woke him as silently as we could. He was still half asleep when we drew him into our candle-lit room. That fact helped us — and we were able to make use of the knowledge to infinite effect later. In his half-waking state we secured control of his faculties in less than half an hour, and he was ours.
Arabin was much more difficult. The Vulcanids had implanted their control much deeper in his mind, and we found that the utmost endeavour was needed to battle with the alien mind gripping his own. At last, weary and wretched, we seemed to have succeeded just as day was breaking. At least, we judged that we had succeeded, for, like myself, he collapsed under the ordeal.
We left him for half an hour, and then we returned to the attack by waking him.
Thank God! When we had him fully awake he had rid himself of the Vulcanid control.
From that moment onwards we were feverishly active. Leo took charge, and we planned the programme necessary for the reception of any Discs that might come.
Firstly — food. Leo stayed by the landing ground to which Krill Hvensor's Disc would return, and the rest of us hurried out of the park to find what provisions we could. We had reasoned that at least five months must have passed since the catastrophe that had destroyed Terrestrial humanity. That was a minimum estimate. If, as we believed, time had literally stood still for us out in space, the period might be incalculably greater. We had one slight clue: the grass of the parkland where we had landed was only about ten inches deep. The flower beds, too, had not yet run completely to seed, and although they were filled with weeds, they were not yet choked.
I have reason to believe, as I write this, that some eight or nine months must have passed since mankind annihilated himself.
But to return to our quest: within a quarter of a mile of the park gates we came out into the little town's High Street. We covered its length hurriedly, and counted nine food shops of one sort and another that would be sure to carry stocks of tinned food. There were others, but here the goods were perishable, and we saw great forests of fungus and mildew growing over such stocks as bread and vegetables.
We gave such places a wide berth, fearing that the fungoid growths might be connected with the as yet unknown cataclysm. Whatever forms of life had been destroyed, we noted, the lowest form of all — the unicellular structures and the fungi — still thrived.
We saw few bodies, and at that time found it hard to understand why the streets were not strewn with them. We learned later, as I shall explain in due course.
Within an hour we were back at the park with as much tinned food as we could carry. There was a plentiful supply of water at several points in the park, and we had, in our blind confidence fostered by the Vulcanid Intelligences, proved by drinking that the water was pure.
We made four such trips, and our return from the last saw a good stock of tinned stuff piled in what had been the Borough Treasurer's office. Then we sat down to rest and to wait for Krill Hvensor's Discs to arrive.
Before noon we sighted the first Disc, and greeted it by furious waving. If we had been shipwrecked men we could not have welcomed our rescuers more vociferously. We shouted and waved excitedly as the Disc spiralled down to a gentle landing on the rank turf.
As we ran across what had been the lawns around our — we called it "our" for long after that — Town Hall, Krill Hvensor slid out from the under side of the disc, followed by — what?
Had he brought our own people, or members of his own kind?
As he stooped to assist those who followed him, we cheered again. There was Otto Langer, the German, an old friend of ours. There was Neil Flower, the playboy of our old Colony, and behind him came another welcome character, David Cohen.
Then as they approached us, we lost our enthusiasm. Each man was still, only too obviously, controlled by the minds that had controlled us.
They walked across to us in a too-confident manner; their greeting was too matter-of-fact; they had, it was all too plain to see, accepted the fact that here they were, and everything would be looked after for them.
Accordingly, we humoured them, and fell in with their mood. We chatted lightly, as though we had but recently left them under normal conditions.
Using the knowledge we had already gained, we impressed upon them the need for sleep. We
led them to the make-shift dormitories that Leo had fixed up in our absence, and saw them comfortably installed therein. Arabin stayed with them — "I'll catch 'em as they wake." he whispered.
Krill Hvensor, though! He was in a truly pitiable state.
With generations of control by the Hafna Intelligences as his background, he had consciously tried to break the control. And the result of the mental battle showed sadly on his face. He, too, we tried to persuade to sleep.
We should probably never have succeeded if Casimir had not solved the problem.
"I saw a doctor's house as we left the park," he said, thoughtfully. "Do you think... morphia?"
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