by Bill Schutt
Pliny observed that Severus did not seem at all unsettled by the prolonged physical inspection. In fact his attitude was undergoing a puzzling reversal.
Proculus, his color having returned to normal, sidled up to Pliny and together they watched as the Ceran physician brought her face close to the centurion’s, brushing one side of her mane across a cheek. She stared directly into his eyes and he returned the stare.
Pliny nodded toward Severus and spoke under his breath. “He seems to have snuck in a weapon after all.”
Proculus managed a smile. “His short sword, apparently.”
In the Valley of the Morlocks
July 10, 1946
“Is it me or do you feel like we’ve just landed on another world?”
MacCready nodded absently at Jerry’s comment, having been thinking something along those very lines.
Major Patrick Hendry had once brought up the topic of what might happen if the aliens from an Asimov or Heinlein science fiction story ever landed on earth for real.
“Maybe they’d be friendly,” Mac had suggested.
Hendry shooed away the comment as if it were a fly. “It wouldn’t matter how friendly they were.”
“But—”
“Just look in the mirror, Mac. That’ll tell you all you need to know about what our reaction would be. People are people.”
“So what do you think would happen?”
“Look, if Orson Wells’s Martians landed in New Jersey and tried to cross the Hudson, they’d be on the daily ‘Specials Board’ at the Fulton Fish Market by noon. And if by some luck they happened to taste like crap, they’d be peering out from behind bars at the Bronx Zoo.”
Mac forgot the rest of the conversation (something about hating calamari) but the bottom line was that he himself had some serious reservations about how humanity would react to an alien encounter. And now that they’d met the Morlocks, the closest thing to an alien civilization anyone had ever seen, he was even more skeptical.
But who must be more alien to whom? he wondered. It was a trio of humans, after all, who, much like Wells’s Martians, had fallen into their world aboard a flying machine. And just as the fictional Martians coveted the earth, Hendry’s “bigwigs in D.C.” coveted the organism Morlocks (or their ancestors) presumably used to shape life. MacCready supposed it spoke volumes about Morlock temperament that upon capture, he and his friends were not treated immediately to Major Hendry’s fish market solution. Instead, they were escorted through a sea of carnivorous grass to an igloo-like structure that apparently served as the local version of a county jail.
Their “cell” was undergoing some final assembly by a pair of Morlocks. The last of the freshly cut blocks were being set into place atop the nine-foot-high dome—which glistened through the mist and the shifting tide of snowflakes like an improbably large gemstone.
Mac looked around thoughtfully as they reached the arched entrance. The inchworm grass seemed to be keeping its distance, which he counted on the plus side. Yanni was listening intently to something out there in the mist, and though Mac and Jerry tried to listen in with her, neither of them was able to detect anything more than a barely perceptible, low-frequency murmur. They both shot Yanni a quizzical expression. “Whatcha got?” Mac asked.
“Those ain’t Morlocks,” she whispered.
R. J. MacCready managed a smile, having flashed once more, in his imagination, to the skull they’d shown Charles Knight back at the museum—the midget mammoth with its strange mutation hinting at two elephantine trunks. More interesting by far, he thought, was that the “mutation” suggested the possibility of two manipulative limbs, serving perhaps the same function as human arms and hands.
Yanni made a low-frequency sound that caught the sudden attention of all four of their captors.
What could be more fantastic? Mac wondered, watching Yanni as she called to the unseen mammoths. But before he could say a word, he had become airborne.
Flung through the igloo entrance, Mac thrust out his hands to avoid plowing face-first into the floor.
What the hell?
Jerry and Yanni were similarly tossed into the structure, landing beside and on top of him. Within that same second, one of the Morlocks pushed a slab along a groove at the threshold of the arch, sealing the prison door.
Rising to his feet, Mac observed that the portal was crystal clear, and so precisely cut that it fit perfectly into the curve of the dome.
“That doesn’t look very secure,” Yanni said, gesturing toward the now closed doorway. “Can’t weigh more than a coupla hundred pounds.”
“I’m thinking they put it there to keep the grass off the people—if you know what I mean,” Mac said.
“You’re right,” Jerry added. “These monsters probably couldn’t care less if we did decide to stage a jailbreak.”
As indeed they could not.
This became as crystal clear as the ice door itself. Seconds after sliding it into place, the Morlocks simply walked away, leaving no guards behind.
Dusk descended quickly, and in response the local “streetlights” came on. Fungi glowed in the loamy soil, and bioluminescent plants and animals were active as well. But beyond a range of forty or fifty feet, every detail was hidden by the fog—which absorbed and scattered the phosphorescence.
Where dusk ended and where nightfall began had been difficult to define. Through the ice and not more than two yards away, they watched the lawn trying to close in—repelled by the scent, spread by the jail’s architects over their prison’s ice blocks. As the carnivorous blades continued testing the chemical boundaries of the igloo, a fist-sized, crablike creature burrowed up out of the ground. After flicking off a few shreds of shimmering plant matter, it began emitting a blue phosphorescence, then skittered toward the igloo’s outer wall. A breakaway swarm of grass followed it, closing in quickly.
“This is gonna be ugly,” Mac muttered, but he squatted down anyway to get a closer look. Watch out, little guy.
The crab scurried to within a foot of the structure, the blades continuing their hot pursuit of the pulsating blue light. If anything, Mac thought, it’s attracting even more of them. Suddenly the crustacean flashed a stunning strobe of white.
“What the—” MacCready cried, snapping his eyes shut—too late.
“You all right?” Yanni said, moving in beside him.
“Just swell,” he replied, shaking his head. A circular green afterimage burned brightly in his right eye. “Did you catch that?”
“I think so,” Yanni said, watching as the former predators inchwormed their way backward in double-time fashion. Apparently, though, not all of them were successful, since the crab was now casually munching on one of the creatures, spaghetti-style, while brandishing several more, clamped tightly in a second claw. As the vanquished lawn mimics made an uncomfortable transition from hunter to main course, the crab continued to glow—blue to deep violet to blue again.
“Gotta admit, this prison has a coupla interesting features,” Yanni said.
“And practical,” Jerry added. “Who needs guards when the local grass can cut us down?”
“Unless, of course, you happen to be a light-emitting crustacean,” Mac countered.
“I’m tellin’ ya, this place is amazing. Beautiful, too,” Yanni gushed. “So why the hell would we want to run?”
Jerry started to answer but Yanni turned to Mac. “Would you run? If we could get out of here?”
Mac shrugged his shoulders. He knew exactly how his friend would respond and she did not disappoint.
“Look, maybe you two are scheming to take a powder, but I plan on leavin’ with a whole lot more knowledge and with my—you know—” She got stuck on a word.
“Dignity,” Mac finished for her.
“Right,” she said. “We’re explorers, aren’t we? And there’s so much to learn here. So much to do.”
Jerry gestured toward the walls of their prison. “If we weren’t locked in an icebox.”
> Yanni turned toward the color-shifting crab outside—which seemed to have finished its meal. Jerry and Mac followed her gaze, watching as the creature sank back into the frost and earth, its light diminishing to a dull blue glow before blinking out.
“No argument there, Yanni,” Mac said. “That was certainly an interesting little floor show. I’m guessing the blue color serves as an attractant while that flash functions as an offensive weapon.”
“How do you figure?” Yanni asked.
“You ever heard of William Beebe?”
“Sounds familiar,” she replied.
“He used to be a curator at the Bronx Zoo. Birds.”
“Neighbor of yours, too,” Jerry added, and Yanni shot him a quizzical look. “Brooklyn boy.”
MacCready continued. “’Bout twelve years ago, Beebe and another guy took a diving bell down to three thousand feet. One of the things he described was a fish that used a phosphorescent lure to attract its prey.”
“Which is certainly the obvious explanation for what we just saw,” said Jerry.
Mac raised an eyebrow. “But?”
“But I’m starting to think that calling anything around here obvious is the first reason we should doubt it.”
“Speaking of which, I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Yanni announced, “but the lights are shuttin’ down.”
She’s right, Mac realized. It is getting darker.
“Well, there ya go, Mac,” Jerry said. “So much for any similarity to William Beebe’s strange fish. When it’s darkest, bioluminescent life should be at its brightest.”
Mac peered into the mist and knew that his friends were right. At first, shortly after the last cloud-penetrating rays of sunset had retreated behind mountains and heralded dusk, the mist shimmered brightly from every direction—more brightly than the twilight itself. Now some lurid and heatless fire still burned out there, providing scarcely more illumination than a clear, starry night far from the city.
Outside, shadows held sway over the world, and these alone—whether imagined or not—became the real inhabitants of the Morlock’s lair. Mac believed he observed a large figure moving in the distance, against the barely perceptible light, but he became reasonably certain that it had been something no larger than a cat, prowling only fifteen or twenty paces away. Surely it must have walked among the grass mimics, and he wondered what defense it might have evolved to avoid being eaten by the lawn.
“You know, if you think about it, it kinda makes sense for the local biolumes to feed at dusk, then shut it down in the evening.”
Jerry thought about it for a moment. “Biolumes, huh?” Then he gave the name an approving nod. “So how do you figure, Mac?”
“Well, it’s no stretch that there are probably aerial predators out there, doing their night-owl act over this valley. And if so, then anything illuminating up through these clouds at night could go from being hunter to hunted before you can say, ‘Talon time.’”
“And so . . . they dim their lights,” Yanni said.
Jerry stared out through the panoramic “window,” lost in thought for several seconds. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll give you that. So the little bit of shadow glow that remains must be completely invisible from above the fog.”
Mac nodded. “Ding. No more calls.”
Jerry, though, hadn’t quite finished with their exercise in hypothesis building. “Also seems to me that shutting off the lights when it gets really dark preadapts the local wildlife to avoiding nighttime eyes of another sort.”
“You mean, human eyes?”
“Yeah, nighttime recon from the air.”
Mac found himself agreeing with his friend once again. Unlike the far more luminous world they had seen in the underground cathedrals, the denizens of the valley had no light-blocking layers of rock overhead. And neither was the snowy fog dense enough to completely block out bioluminescence. Without a carefully timed cycle, the lake of mist would glow as brightly as the twilight sky itself—easily seen from the cliffs above, and nowadays by passing aircraft.
“It’s either a preadaptation or one hell of a coincidence,” Jerry said. “I suppose—”
Yanni jabbed him in the side with an elbow. “Did you see that?”
“I saw it. But what’s with the elbow?”
“Keep looking,” she replied.
Mac stifled a laugh, knowing that part of the reason she’d thrown the jab was to prevent another round of Who knew more shit. Staring through the broad lens of ice, he saw nothing. “I missed it. Whatcha see?”
“A shadow about the size of a horse,” said Jerry. “But it was gone in only a second or two.”
“Out there with our chompy-grassy pals? You sure?”
“That’s what I saw, too, Mac,” Yanni affirmed.
If the prison’s internal temperature being down near freezing was not enough to make them step away from the ice window, phantasms on the other side decided the issue.
They retreated to the center of their cell and sat back-to-back on the floor, each facing outward to cover one-third of their 360-degree view through the ice. The darkness, and fleeting glimpses of the mysteries it concealed, should have made sleep impossible, but their minds had been in a state of information overload all day, and now, even as their breathing had become easier with each passing hour, they were exhausted. And so one by one they began to slump and doze off.
May, a.d. 67
After the acrobatic doctors were finished examining the three Romans, after sunlight had ceased filtering down through the dome’s crystalline panes, the living corral of Ceran guards opened up on one side and the trio of humans were shepherded uphill. They were moved toward a central, spiral horn of strong, fiber-infused ice. It was crystalline art, a tower in which perhaps hundreds of Cerae dwelled. Pliny and Proculus were led across a broad balcony to an open-air room, with bowls of warm food laid out beside comfortable-appearing animal pelts. One of the little doctors separated Severus from his friends and two of the race Pliny had begun to call the “warrior caste” ushered Severus along behind her. Without any chittering, any words, or any fuss at all, she disappeared with him into an adjoining chamber.
Pliny puzzled over this for a moment, then looked around.
Where are we?
On the landscape below, only three or four small fires had been lit after sunset, yet Pliny could see clearly. A heatless, opalescent light gradually brightened the interior, highlighting the artistry of the grown arches, and the world over which those arches towered. Aside from a handful of multistoried structures (indecipherable as to their purpose, Pliny decided), most of the dome’s interior space appeared to be devoted to a concentric arrangement of presumably agricultural gardens. Their captors farmed ghostly white plants varying greatly in height, all of them unfamiliar to the naturalist. A thin, waist-high mist hung over the gardens of the Cerae, filling the air with an underscent like rotten eggs.
The light grew almost bright enough to read by, then brightened further.
“Where are we?” Pliny asked again—this time aloud.
Proculus did not answer him. He had just discovered that some of his flesh was falling away.
For as far back as anyone could remember, the young man’s face was marred by warts—most of them blacker than his Nubian skin, others alarmingly shifting toward an ugly, reddish purple. During the past year, Proculus had come to peace with the dawning reality that some of the growths had been worsening into a condition commonly called “the rocks.” To a few, though, the mysterious affliction was known by another name. Pliny knew that, centuries earlier, when Hippocrates had examined victims, the pattern of veins on the solid, malignant tumors reminded him of the legs and claws of a crab. Accordingly, the physician named the condition after the Greek word for the creatures—carcinos. Recently, Pliny heard the condition called by the Latin word for crab—cancer.
Proculus scratched at a growth near his lip that had lately begun bleeding. But now, like the large warts tha
t had simply fallen from his cheek, the mass of hardened flesh also came away, leaving behind only the faintest patch of scar tissue.
Surprise and disgust creased the cavalryman’s face, and Pliny returned it with his own look of astonishment. “Amazing. And how are you recovering from those smashed-out teeth of yours?” he asked.
He ran the tip of his tongue over the gap in his smile, pressing hard. “Painless,” Proculus replied. “Completely painless.”
“I would not be surprised to see those teeth trying to grow back,” Pliny said, failing to notice that two physicians had mounted the balcony ledge, far more stealthily than any leopard.
“If we can learn how they do this, and bring it back to—” Proculus began to say, but cut his words short.
Both men had heard the sound—if only barely—like parchment shifting in a breeze. They turned toward the ledge and were startled by the presence of the statue-like visitors.
Pliny wondered if the Cerae had captured additional Westerners over the years. And if so, might these creatures understand some measure of Latin?
“It’s nice to see you healing so well, Proculus,” he said. “Now rest your mouth and speak no more.”
The cavalryman looked puzzled for a moment but then nodded.
Yes, Proculus, Pliny told himself. There is a power here. And a wealth any emperor would envy.
His new hope was that the Cerae could not read his mind.
Predawn, July 11, 1946
Not even a shove from the alpha Morlock could have been more startling than the sound that awoke Yanni. It seemed that the very sky had called out to her, first as a low-frequency drone, followed quickly by trumpeting and moaning and clicking.
Jerry, looking alarmed, was on his feet in seconds, staring up at the manhole-size vent in the ceiling.
“What’s happening, Yanni?”
“Elephants,” she said, noting that while they sounded similar to the unseen animals they had heard upon first entering the valley, these calls were louder and more beautiful. Yet it was also a mournful beauty.
