“I think I showed remarkably good judgment when I fell in love with you,” Joyce said, all of the anger gone from her voice. “You are willing to argue against yourself when you feel you may have been mistaken.”
“We’ll know soon enough exactly how mistaken I may have been,” Wilmont said, looking up at the patch of open sky which had come into view between the thinning canopy of leaves. They had emerged from under foliage so dense that the sunlight had filtered down with a few fitful gleams of brightness. “The most serious mistake we could make—”
He broke off abruptly, and came to a sudden halt, his hand going out to fasten on Joyce’s wrist.
“Stand still—listen!” he said, his voice tight with concern. “We are being followed. Kaljac said they would move silently. But he was right about the snapping of twigs in the underbrush. If they’re very close and there are ten or fifteen of them that crackling sound will come again.”
“Yes, I heard it,” Joyce said. “But it could have been made by some small animal.”
Wilmont shook his head. “I doubt it,” he said. “Listen!”
The forest confirmed his surmise. There arose a pattering noise, as of raindrops descending, and the forest came to life. There was a rustling that could have been made by a wind stirring the foliage at their backs—if the day had not been windless—and something that sounded like a bird call choked off by fright. It was followed by a wild fluttering, and a large blackbird came into view and flew from a low wall of foliage to the topmost branch of the nearest tree.
When they heard the crackling again, very loud and near, all of their fears were confirmed. They were being pursued. The pursuers were apparently sure of victory and had abandoned all caution, forfeiting the advantage which they might have gained by staging a surprise attack.
Although the Krull could not have heard the commotion in the underbrush as quickly as Wilmont and Joyce, he responded with surprising swiftness the instant he became aware that all was not well. He left Wentworth’s side and darted back along the column, planting himself directly in front of Bramwell.
Kaljac was making urgent gestures with his stubby arms when the underbrush at the end of the column shook for a dozen feet in both directions, and a tall Telen emerged into the open. He carried no weapons, but he was quickly followed by ten or twelve Telens who were equipped with gleaming metal instruments which they kept steadily trained on the halted column.
Wilmont and Joyce were blocked by the tall, unarmed Telen; they could not plunge into the underbrush without colliding with him, and they were prevented from fleeing in the opposite direction by a woman and a child who had succumbed to utter terror, and were running straight toward them.
In a moment the long line was completely broken. The children broke away from their parents, ignoring warning shouts and a pursuit that was quickly abandoned. They scattered in all directions, a few seeking the false security of the tall trees near the head of the column. They ducked behind the enormous boles and peered out in hide-and-seek fashion, but the terror in their faces showed that their futile attempt to conceal themselves was not a game to them.
Most of the adults lost their heads and made no attempt to regroup and take up defensive positions with their backs to the trees. Wentworth and his wife did not attempt to flee, but froze where they had been standing. Their two children had joined them and the entire family seemed more in command of themselves than any of the others, though Helen Wentworth was trembling violently. Her small daughter was clutching frantically at her skirts as if, like the older children, she had become fully aware by now that the Telens had only one thought in mind—to take away their liberty and shut them up again in a big metal room with no windows. Only Bramwell appeared to be completely calm and resolute as he turned to face the steadily advancing Telens, and walked toward them arms upraised.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There was no longer any doubt in Bramwell’s mind that he might well be walking to his death. The years seemed to fall away as he walked, and he was a young man again, with the bright lights of a great city shining in his eyes and all of its night sounds roaring in his ears.
New York was a half million years in the past and yet only the thinnest of dividing lines seemed now to separate that past from a present that was totally alien to him.
If he had slept for ten million years and awakened on some distant planet in an unknown region of space, no stranger creature than a Krull could have pleaded with him to come to the assistance of men and women like himself to whom he owed nothing, beyond the bond which he shared with them.
It was a bond not easily broken, for what he had in common with them was no more—and no less—than everything that had given his life meaning on a tiny island in the vast ocean of time.
They were of his own time and place, helplessly adrift now on that ocean in the frailest of lifeboats. No—the lifeboat had gone down and they were castaways on another island and if he failed to rescue them they would have to abandon all hope.
A hundred doubts assailed him as he advanced to meet the Telens, and for a moment the strange thought-exchange, that he had been told by the Krull would take the place of spoken words, gave him so much concern that he found it hard to concentrate on what the Krull had told him to say.
How could speech be silent and yet leap from mind to mind in ringing syllables? How could a voice that arose in the mind impinge not at all on human ears and yet be heard as distinctly as a voice raised in a shout?
The Krull had assured him that there was no need for him to utter a spoken word—that even to move his lips would be a mistake, since it would mislead and confuse them. Only in his mind must the voice be heard, by himself first, as if he were speaking his thoughts aloud and then by the Telens. And when they answered him he must be prepared to carry the conversation forward in the same voiceless way, syllable by unspoken syllable, and without doubting for a moment that he was making himself heard.
The tall, unarmed Telen, who was clearly the leader of the advancing group, was within twenty feet of Bramwell now and there was something about his expression and the way he held himself that gave him the look of a man approaching a sacred shrine who might, at any moment, drop to his knees.
Suddenly the silence was shattered by what sounded to Bramwell like the voice of a man with as fluent a command of English as he himself possessed. But the lips of the speaker did not move at all, and he knew that the silence which had been shattered had been solely a thought projection, for the voices of the forest had not been stilled. There were frightened whisperings and the crackling of twigs everywhere and yet the voice of the Telen seemed to come from some other plane of existence where the silence had been absolute.
“The men and women of your own age were about to betray you,” the voice said. “If they took you back to the twentieth century everything that you hoped to accomplish would crumble and be lost. We need your help to preserve a greatness which they cannot understand. In their selfish and petty minds that greatness has become a threat to their own survival, and they can think of nothing else. They have closed their minds to us, attempted to deceive and mislead us. We are closer to you than they are, for John Bramwell and the Telens share the same shining vision—the vision of a wisdom so profound, a purpose so unyielding, that the entire universe of stars will be transformed by what we shall accomplish.”
There was silence again for an instant and then the voice went on: “You have conquered death and we can travel back and forth in time. But that is just a beginning. For a brief moment we have allowed ourselves to doubt our own greatness, to falter and draw back from the tasks which must be undertaken if we are to remain as daring as you were when you hid your great glory from men who had no knowledge of what the future would be like. We thought that your great wisdom would be shared by others—even in your age. But we were mistaken. We know that now. We know how great you are, but they do not. We have w
aited so long…”
Bramwell made an effort to follow the Krull’s advice. It proved less difficult than he had feared. His voice seemed to ring out in the silence, although his lips remained un-moving.
“You must not think me harsh—or lacking in understanding. But you are mistaken. I possess no more wisdom than a great many men and women of the twentieth century and considerably less wisdom than the many gifted scientists, philosophers, artists and skilled craftsman that made it a not unworthy age. We did our best, with the tools we had. We had thinkers and dreamers and poets who knew that there would someday be a better, more creative world. We did our best, do you understand?”
“But what you say is madness!” came in quick reply. “There is no need for you to find excuses for a blindness so universal that not one of the men, women and children we have removed from your age seems to have been aware of how great you were. How can you expect us to believe that you shared that blindness and concealed the whole of the truth from yourself?”
“I concealed nothing from myself,” Bramwell said.
“Wait, wait,” came the reply. “It is just possible that you did not know. The truly great are always humble, can be blind to their own greatness. Tell me that it was so. Surely you must realize now that it was so. You have put death forever behind you, you have accomplished what even we would have thought impossible—”
“No,” Bramwell said. “I have not put death forever behind me. I could die now, if a small splinter of steel pierced my chest. And I would not awaken again.”
“That is not true,” the Telen said, his voice so fiercely challenging that it seemed to echo like a pistol shot through the aisles of the forest. A pistol shot could also have put an end to his life, Bramwell thought—long ago in another world that suddenly seemed to sweep close to him again. He could almost hear again the roar of city traffic, and the winking lights of tall buildings and hear a familiar voice whispering close to his ear as he tossed about on a bed of pain: “Darling, you will live again when I am dust. A way will be found to cure you. They will know so much more about cancer than we do…”
“Even now,” Bramwell said, “I carry the seeds of death in my body, and I am not sure that you have found a way to destroy them. In our age there was a disease—”
“We are familiar with all the diseases which were common in your age,” the Telen said. “And it is true that some of them remain unconquered. But for thousands of years we have known that you would awaken restored to health in body and mind. I was taught as a child what I have since come to believe as a man. You will never die.”
“Why do you say that? I have told you that I am as mortal as you are. My death has only been postponed. I will not be alive fifty years from now.”
“You will be alive when the sun cools and the earth is a dead world spinning through space. It is an unfathomable mystery. But we would have known if it were not true. Your great wisdom has enabled you to conquer death forever.”
Bramwell knew then that what the Krull had told him about the Telens was true. They were totally mad.
It was the most dangerous kind of madness, for it contradicted everything that the Telens must have known about him. The frozen sleep that had prolonged his life had been well within the scope of twentieth century science and yet they were determined to believe that a mysterious kind of wisdom—a wisdom little different from the tribal magic of a witch doctor—had made him immortal. Human wisdom alone, knowledge alone, hardly supernatural attributes, could not have given a man godlike qualities and miraculous powers of survival.
The Telen facing Bramwell must have contained his rage and frustration with the thought that a man who had slept for a half million years would be too bewildered on awakening to grasp the full truth about himself, immediately.
Bramwell suddenly decided that he had already said more than the Krull would have thought wise, that silence might be his best protection. But the Telen would not permit him to remain silent.
“You have awakened with the memory of a past that you cannot—must not—return to,” the Telen said, and Bramwell did not like the look that was creeping into his eyes. “The past is gone, it has dropped away from you, and you can never return to it now. Surely you must know that.”
Bramwell and the Telen looked at each other. Despite the awe which the Telen had displayed when he had first drawn near to Bramwell the two men became suddenly engaged in a contest of wills. Bramwell could feel the Telen’s rage beating in tumultuous waves against his brain.
It would not have been so frightening if Bramwell had not known that the rage of a madman could be quite different from the fury of a sane man. It could spring from uncertainty alone, a dark suspicion that a delusion that must not be questioned was about to be attacked and all of its hollowness exposed.
The Telen turned abruptly and walked to where the nearest of his armed companions was standing. He spoke to him briefly, swung about again and gestured toward Bramwell, jabbing at the air with his forefinger.
The shining instrument in the second Telen’s clasp began slowly to vibrate. The instrument had three gleaming prongs attached to it, and it was trained on Bramwell.
The voice of the Telen leader came again, like the crack of a whip drawn swiftly back and just as swiftly uncoiling.
“For a hundred generations only the wretched Krulls have doubted a truth that has been proclaimed, again and again, by the wisest of our ancestors. Again and again your mind has been probed while you slept, the exact hour of your awakening determined. You will see for yourself that we cannot possibly have been deceived. You have put death forever behind you. This weapon, powerful as it is, will not harm you.”
The shining metal instrument trained on Bramwell made a low humming noise. The sound increased in volume until it drowned out all of the forest murmurs and the frightened voices of the children. The adults who stood in widely scattered groups between the trees were all looking in the same direction now, clearly sharing the children’s alarm. But no sound came from them, and not one of them attempted to move.
Only Bramwell moved, taking a quick step backward. It was an instinctive recoil from the death that he knew was about to come flaming out of the instrument—a futile recoil, because if he had turned and fled he could not have hoped to save himself.
His lips moved then, for the first time and an articulated cry came from them. Until that moment only the inward silence had been broken when he had communicated with the Telen from a subliminal plane of existence.
It was a stricken cry, loud and clear, a desperate appeal for understanding. “No, no…you must not use that weapon! I have told you the truth. I will die instantly.”
Neither the Telen leader nor his armed companion…they were standing side by side now…seemed to have heard him. They were both looking at the vibrating instrument, with the intensity of minds deranged and dominated by a single, relentless compulsion—to preserve a delusion that nothing must be allowed to shatter.
Bramwell took another slow step backward, the stricken look that had come into his eyes deepening, aging his features. His face, pinched with horror and despair, resembled that of a very old man tottering on the brink of the grave.
The instrument in the second Telen’s clasp was vibrating violently; he tightened his grip on it, and hunched his shoulders, as if he feared it would leap from his hands. And suddenly there darted from it a thin, almost threadlike filament of flame.
The filament crossed the short distance which separated Bramwell and the two Telens and flickered for a moment over Bramwell from his head to the soles of his feet. And all at once it was no longer a filament but a sheet of flame that billowed out as it brightened and swiftly soared to a height of twenty feet.
In the midst of the flame, Bramwell remained visible for an instant, thrashing about with his limbs agonizingly contorted, the long row of trees at his back looming up behind him like
the walls of a burning house.
Then the flame swallowed him up, and continued to brighten, until it seemed less like a flame than a pulsing blob of radiance that had fallen from the sky and was filling the dark forest aisle with so dazzling a glare that it seemed for a moment to outshine the noonday sun.
Then, abruptly the glare vanished and where Bramwell had been standing there was now only a smouldering pile of fallen leaves and a few blackened twigs. Of Bramwell himself there remained no trace.
One of the smaller children screamed and a woman standing close to him darted quickly to his side and drew him protectively into her arms, as if fearful that the terrible act of destruction might at any moment be repeated.
The Telens who had emerged from the underbrush were carrying the same kind of weapons. There was an instant and overwhelming surrender to panic; no one remained still. Five of the adults broke for the cover of the trees, as most of the children had done when the Telens had first appeared, and threw themselves fiat on the ground or staggered waveringly about as if they had been struck blind.
The smell of burning still hung in the air, but the Telens were not looking in the direction of the smouldering leaves, nor at the terrified men, women and children.
They were looking at the Telen leader, who had fallen to his knees and was beating furiously at his temples with his fists.
One Telen and then another began to sway and wild, despairing wails arose in the forest gloom.
The wailing continued for a minute and then it stopped as abruptly as it had arisen. A change seemed to come over the Telens and one by one they straightened and stood very still, their eyes still on the kneeling figure of their leader.
One of the shining weapons began to vibrate. It was as if an understanding had passed between them with the briefest of exchanged glances—an agreement that only one weapon would be needed.
A filament of flame came from the vibrating instrument of destruction, the humming grew very loud. The flame was the same as the one that had played for an instant over Bramwell’s body before he had been blotted from view by a burst of consuming fire. It was directed downward and the end of it zigzagged across the fallen leaves like a luminous worm before it whipped across the shoulders of the kneeling Telen and moved back and forth across his back.
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel Page 48
