He ripped it away—hurled it from him. And as it fell—it screamed!
But he was free.
For an instant sheer weakness overwhelmed him. Then into him poured a racing, jubilant torrent of strength, of mighty, intoxicating power that seemed to heal his wounds and revivify him instantly.
Into him surged the power of the Protectors!
From the alcove a finger of darkness tendrilled out. He was borne away from it . . . along the passage. Dimly, through drifting mists, he sensed that he was moving up a ramp . . . through a wall that seemed to grow intangible as he approached it . . . up and up . . .
He was in the hall of the Aesir.
Above him the cyclopean pillers towered, dwarfing the thrones set between them. Before him hung the shifting wall of light.
He was carried toward it—through it. He stood on a black dais. Facing him was the cloaked, cowled figure he had last seen with Kari.
And beside the Aesir stood Kari!
The creature lifted its arm . . . a red flame spouted toward Stuart. Sudden, mocking laughter spilled from his lips. He no longer fought alone. The tremendous power of the Protectors blazed within him, power and energy and force that could smash suns.
In midair the fiery lance failed and died. The Aesir drew back a step, drawing its cloak about it as if in surprise. And Kari—Kari shrank back, too, and something strangely like hope flashed for a moment across her dazzling, her more than mortal loveliness. Hope? But she was of the Aesir now. And if they failed, she died. Then why—
The Aesir’s cloak flickered, and a second gush of fiery light fountained toward Stuart.
Up surged the tide of power in him again. Blind and dazed with his own tremendous energy, Stuart felt a curve like a dim shield flung up to meet that lance. The Aesir’s fire struck—and flashed into blazing fragments on the Protector’s shield. Each droplet sang intolerable music as it faded and winked out. And behind the Aesir, more dazzling than any immortal fire had been, Stuart saw Kari’s sudden, shining smile . . .
She would die if the Aesir failed. She must know she would die. But the brilliance of her smile struck him as the Aesir’s spear of fire could never strike. He knew, then. He understood . . .
The Aesir’s cloak whirled like a storm-cloud, in dark, deep billows. The Aesir itself grew taller for a moment, as if it drew itself up to a godlike height. And then it did for Derek Stuart what no Aesir had ever done for a mortal man before. No Aesir had ever needed to. It cast off the hampering cloak and stood stripped for battle with this primitive manling whose forebears immemorially long ago had been the Aesir’s forebears. There was in that stripping something almost of kinship—an acknowledgment that here at last in the hall of the Aesir stood an equal, sprung of equal stock . . .
Naked in its terrible power, the Aesir stood up to face the man.
Not human. Not every human, except in the mysterious basics which these people of a thousand millenniums in the future had chosen to retain. The flesh they had cast off, and the flesh the Aesir stood up in to face his forebear was pure, blazing, blinding energy. Twice as tall as a man it stood, shining with supernal brilliance, terrible and magnificent.
The great hall rang soundlessly with the power of the Protectors.
And then from above a streak of light came flashing, and another, and another. And were engulfed in the one Aesir who stood shining before its adversary, growing ever brighter and more terrible. The rest of the Aesir, coming to the aid of their fellow, forming a single entity to crush the champion of mankind.
Stuart braced himself for the incredible torrent of energy that would come blasting through him from the Protectors. And in a split second—it came!
Mind and body reeled beneath the impact of that power as force flared through him and struck out at the tower of lightning which was the Aesir. But the force which was trying his human body to its utmost was not force enough to touch that blinding column. Energy lashed out from it, struck him a reeling blow—Stuart dropped to his knees, the hall swimming in fire around him.
But what he saw was not the terrible, blazing image of his adversary, but Kari’s face beyond. His falling meant her life—but when she saw him go down the brilliance dimmed upon her features. The hope he had seen there went out like a candle-flame and she was once more only a vessel of human flesh which the Aesir had possessed and degraded.
In his despair and his dizziness he cried soundlessly, “Help me, Protectors! Give me your power!”
The still double-voice said, “You could not hold it. You would be burned out utterly.”
“I’ll hold it long enough!” he promised desperately. “One second of power—only that! Enough to smash the Aesir. Then death—but not till then!”
There was one instant when time stopped. That cataclysmic horror that had risen a thousand years ago and raged through the worlds like a holocaust stood blazing before Stuart’s eyes. It stooped toward him, poising for the hammer blow that would smash him to nothing—
THEN a power like the drive of galaxies through space thundered into Stuart’s mind.
He had not expected this. Nothing in human experience could have taught him to expect it. For the Protectors were not human. No more human than the Aesir themselves. And the unleashed energy that roared soundlessly through Stuart rocked his very soul on its foundations. He could not stir. He could not think. He could only stay upon his knees facing the Aesir-thing as galactic power thundered through him and wielded him like a sword against man’s enemies.
Higher and higher rose the crashing tides of contest. The citadel shook ponderously upon the rocks of the god-made little world. Perhaps that world itself staggered in space as the titans battled together on its rocking surface.
Faster spun the core of radiant light which was the Aesir. Faster raced the tides of power through Stuart’s blasted body, seeming to rip his very flesh apart and blaze in his brain like hammers of cosmic fire.
Terribly, terribly he yearned for surcease, for the end of this unthinkable destruction that was tearing his brain and body apart. And he knew he could end it in a moment, if he chose to let go . . .
Grimly he clung to the power that was destroying him. Second by second, counting each moment an eternity, he clung to consciousness. The crashing lances of the Protectors drove on upon the armor of the Aesir, and the cyclopean pillars of the great hall reeled upon their foundations, and the very air blazed into liquid fire around him.
He never knew what final blow of cosmic violence ended that battle. But suddenly, without warning, the vast column of the Aesir pulsed with violent brilliance and the whole hall rang with a cry too shrill and terrible for ears or the very mind to hear, except as a thrilling of despair.
The tower rocked. All the bright tapestries billowed and flowed against the walls. And the radiant thing that was the Aesir—
Went out like a blown flame. Stuart saw it darken in the quickness of a heartbeat from blinding brightness to an angry, sullen scarlet, and then to the color of embers, and then to darkness.
There was nothing there at all.
And Stuart’s brain dimmed with it. One last glimpse he had of the shining smile on Kari’s face, triumph and delight, in the instant before the cloudiness of oblivion blotted her features out.
He was not dead. Somewhere, far away, his body lay prone upon the cold pavement of the Aesir’s hall, a hall terribly empty now of life. But Stuart himself hung in empty space, somewhere between life and death.
The thought of the Protectors touched him gently, almost caressingly.
“You are a mighty man, Derek Stuart. Your name shall not be forgotten while mankind lives.”
With infinite effort he roused his mind. “Kari—” he said.
There was silence for a moment—a warm silence. But the voices, speaking as one, said gently, “Have you forgotten? When the Aesir died, Kari died too. And you, Derek Stuart—you can never go back to your body now. You remember that?” Sudden rebellion shook Stuart’s bodiless b
rain. “Get out of my mind!” he raged at the double voice. “What do you know about human beings? I’ve won for mankind—but what did I win for myself? Nothing—nothing! And Kari—Get out of my mind and let me die! What do you know about love?”
Amazingly, laughter pulsed softly. “Love?” said the double voice. “Love? You have not guessed who we are?” Stuart’s bewildered mind framed only a voiceless question.
“We know humanity,” the twin voices said. “We were human once, a thousand years ago. Very human, Derek Stuart. And we remembered love.”
He half guessed the answer. “You are—”
“There was a man and a woman once,” the voices told him gently. “Mankind still remembers their legend—John Starr and Lorna, who defied the Aesir.”
“John Starr and Lorna!”
“We fought the Aesir in the days when we and they were human. We worked with them on the entropy device that made them what they are now—and made us—ourselves. When we saw what they planned with their power, we fought . . . But they were five, and strong because they were ruthless. We had to flee.”
The voices that spoke as one voice were distant, remembering.
“They grew in power on their Asgard world, changing as the millenniums swept over them, as entropy accelerated for them. And we changed, too, in our own place, in our different way. We are not human now. But we are not monsters, as the Aesir were. We have known failure and bitterness and defeat many times, Derek Stuart. But we remember humanity. And as for love—”
Stuart said bitterly:
“You know your love. You have it forever. But Kari . . . Kari is dead.”
The voices were very gentle. “You have sacrificed more than we. You gave up your love and your bodies. We—”
SILENCE again. Then the woman, serene and gentle-voiced, “There is a way, John. But not an easy one—for us.” Stuart thought, “But Kari is dead.”
The woman said, “Her body is empty of the Aesir life-force. And yours is burned out by the power we poured through it, so that no human could live in it again unless—unless one more than human upheld you.”
“Lorna—”
“We must part for awhile, John. We have been one for a long while. Now we must be two again, for the sake of these two. Until the change . . .”
“What change?” asked Stuart eagerly. “As we changed, so would you, if our lives upheld yours. Entropy would move for you as it moved for the Aesir and for us. And that, too, I think, is good. Mankind will need a leader. And we can help—John and I—more surely if we taste again of humanity. After awhile—after millenniums—the circle will close and John and I will be free to merge again. And you and Kari, too.”
Stuart thought, “But Kari—will it be Kari?”
“It will be,” the gentle voice said. “Cleansed of the evil of the Aesir, supported by my own strength, as you by John’s. You will be yourselves again, with the worlds before you, and afterward—a dwelling among the stars, with us . . .” The man’s voice said, “Lorna, Lorna—”
“You know we must, beloved,” the softer voice said. “We have asked too much of them to offer nothing in repayment. And it will not be goodbye.”
There was darkness and silence.
Stuart was dimly aware of cyclopean heights rising above him. Painfully he stirred. He was clothed in his own body again, and the battle-blasted hall of the dead Aesir towered high into the dimness above him.
He turned his head.
Beside him on the dais a girl, lying crumpled in the shower of her hair, stirred and sighed.
VALLEY OF THE FLAME
Far from civilization, Brian Raft and Parror, the caiman, grapple in a fight to the finish—while a breathless girl looks on and the destiny of a race totters in the balance!
CHAPTER I
Face of a Girl
FAR OFF in the jungle an animal screamed. A river-moth flapped against the screen, nearly as large as a fruit-bat. And very far away, sub-sensory, almost, Brian Raft could hear the low pulsing of drums. Not unusual, drums on the Jutahy, in the great valley of Amazonas. But these were no signal messages.
Raft wasn’t an imaginative man. He left all that to Dan Craddock, with his Welsh ghosts and his shadow-people of the lost centuries. Still, Raft was a doctor, and when those drums throbbed in the jungle something curious happened here in his little hospital of plastic shacks, smelling of antiseptic. Something he couldn’t ignore.
When a sick man’s blood beats in rhythm with the distant drums, slow or fast as the far-off echoes set the pace, a doctor has reason to wonder . . .
The great moth beat softly against the screen. Craddock bent over a sterilizer, steam clouding up around his white head so that he looked like a necromancer stooping over a cauldron. The drums throbbed on. Raft could feel his own heart answering to their rhythm.
He glanced at Craddock again and tried not to remember what the older man had been telling him about his wild Welsh ancestors and the things they had believed. Sometimes he thought Craddock believed them too, or half believed, at least when he had been drinking.
He’d got to know Craddock pretty well in the months they had worked together, but he realized that even yet he knew only the surface Craddock, that another man entirely lived in abeyance behind the companionable front which the Welshman showed him, a man with memories he never spoke of, and stories he never told.
This experimental station, far up the Jutahy, was a curious contrast, with its asepsis and its plastics and its glitter of new instruments, to the jungle hemming it in. They were on assignment just now to find a specific for atypical malaria.
In the ten years since the end of World War II, nothing yet had been discovered any safer than the old quinine and atabrine treatment, and Raft was sifting the jungle lore now to make sure there might not be some truth in the old Indio knowledge, hidden behind masks of devil-worship and magic.
He had hunted down virus diseases in Tibet, Indo-China, Madagascar, and he had learned to respect much that the witchdoctors knew. Some of their treatments were based on very sound theories.
But he wished the drums would stop. He turned irritably from the window and glanced once more at Craddock, who was humming a Welsh ballad under his breath. A ballad full of wild, skirling music about ghosts and fighting.
CRADDOCK had talked a lot lately—since the drums began—about ghosts and fighting. He said he smelled danger. In the old days in Wales men could always scent trouble in the wind, and they’d drink quarts of uisquebaugh and go out brandishing swords, ready for anything. All Raft could smell was the reek of disinfectant that filled the little hospital.
And all the wind brought to him was the sound of drums.
“In the old days,” Craddock said suddenly, looking up from the sterilizer and blinking through steam, “there’d be a whisper in the air from Tralee or Cobh, and we knew the Irish were coming over the water to raid. Or maybe there’d be something from the south, and we’d get ready for the men of Cornwall. But we’d know. We’d know.”
“Rot!” Raft said.
“Okay. But I felt something like this once before.” Craddock sucked in his breath, a curious look of fright and incredulity on his wrinkled brown face. He turned back to the steam-cloud, and Raft watched him in puzzled wonder.
There was a mystery about Craddock. He was a biologist, and a good one, but for thirty years or more he had hung around the Jutahy country, never venturing farther away than Manaos, living precariously as a sort of jungle general practitioner.
Raft had added him to the party on impulse, since Craddock knew the country and the natives. He hadn’t expected too much of the Welshman in the laboratory, for something had happened to Craddock’s hands—they were badly maimed. But he was pleasantly disappointed on that score.
Raft watched the mutilated hands working with hypodermics, twisting plunger from tube, deftly pulling the hollow needles free. Craddock had three fingers on one hand, and the other was a claw, with oddly stained and textured skin. H
e never spoke of what had happened. His injuries didn’t look like the scars of acid burns or animal teeth. Still, he was surprisingly deft, even when liquor was heavy on his breath.
It was heavy now, and Raft thought the man must be deliberately timing his motions to the rhythms of the drums. Or perhaps not. Raft himself had to pause consciously and break step with the beat. And some of the sick men in the ward were alive, he thought, solely because the drum-beats would not let their hearts stop pumping.
“A week now,” Craddock said, with that rather annoying habit he had of catching another man’s thought, or seeming to. “Have you noticed the charts?”
Raft ran a nervous forefinger along the lean line of his jaw. “That’s my job,” he grunted.
Craddock sighed.
“You haven’t lived in Brazil as long as I have, Brian. It’s the things you don’t usually notice that count. Up to a week ago, this plague was killing off the Indians fast. The vitality level’s gone up a lot in the last seven days.”
“Which is crazy,” Raft told him. “It’s accidental—just a cycle. There’s no reason. The drums have nothing to do with it.”
“Did I mention drums?”
Raft glared.
Craddock put the hypos in the sterilizer and closed the lid. “The drums aren’t talking, though. It’s not Western Union. It’s just rhythm. And it means something.”
“What?”
The Welshman hesitated. His face was in shadow, and his white hair gleamed like a fluffy halo in the overhead light. “I think, maybe, there’s a visitor in the forest. I wonder now. Have you ever heard of Curupuri?”
Raft’s face was a mask.
“Curupuri? What’s that?”
“A name. The natives have been talking about Curupuri. Or maybe you haven’t been listening.”
“I seem to miss a lot around here,” Raft said with heavy irony. “I haven’t seen a ghost for months.”
“Maybe you will.” Craddock turned to stare toward the window. “Thirty years. It’s a long time. I—I’ve heard of Curupuri before, though. I even—”
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