by Anthology
“We don’t know what the score is. We do know that we can feel hunger and cold and pain—and if these bodies are any proof, we can be killed—even if it is for the second time. I want to stay living if only to find out what this is all about. Agreed?”
The other three nodded.
“Now something killed all these people. Joe, you take it.”
“Well, I’d say the most of them got their heads bashed but the fresh ones were carved up a little by something sharp. Not teeth or claws—a little sword, maybe, or a big knife.”
“Thanks, Joe. That means there’s danger here. I don’t think all these people killed each other off. It would have been a help if some of them had written down what was after them.”
“Or written it down so we could read it,” Joe said grumpily.
“What do you mean?” Howard asked sharply.
“Oh, didn’t you see that funny lingo scratched on the wall back there? About twenty feet back into the cave?”
Howard cursed softly, lit a torch and hurried back, Mary and Stacey following him. He found the markings. The flickering flame lighted it.
“Modern French,” Stacey said. “Here goes—‘I am the one who remains. They came at dawn to hunt us. The shining men. The others, my comrades, have fallen. We killed one. They took away the body, but our dead are—are—’ ”
She faltered.
“ ‘Unburied’,” Mary said briskly. “ ‘I do not expect to survive the morrow. It is a strange existence in which one must die twice.’ And signed by a character named Lerault.”
“How do you—?” Stacey said,
“Education isn’t restricted to the upper classes, darling,” Mary said.
“Stop that eternal bickering!” Howard yelled. They went back to the fire.
When the flames died down, Joe replenished the blaze.
Mary said softly, “Shining men. Goid your lerns, boys. Tomorrow the battle.”
“Shut up!” Howard said, a note of hysteria in his voice.
“Don’t let her bother you, darling,” Stacey said softly. She took Howard by the arm and the two of them went back into the cave into the darkness.
Joe spat onto the fire. “I was reading once,” he said, “or maybe it was a movie or maybe TV. I forget. Anyway, they got this place where they stock it with animals and then if you’re a very special guy with a big roll, they let you in there to hunt once in a while.
“Very sharp, Joe,” Mary said. “We’re thinking alike. Me, I’m going to give them a hell of a time. I know a place where nobody can come up with me plumping rocks down on their heads.”
Joe, his voice softer, said, “I should a met you a long time ago, Mary. You got guts.”
“Listen to the sweet talk.”
Joe stirred restlessly, his voice growing husky. “Kid, on account of maybe this is our last night and—”
“Not so sharp, Joe. Don’t let the princess give you wrong ideas. On account of this might be our last night, I’ll stay up an hour later and we can have a nice talk.”
Universe organization collapsed when Adolph Kane, egomaniac supervisor of the colonies near Sirius and Alpha Centauri, built a war fleet in secret and, after ten years of bitter warfare wiped out all organized resistance on the part of the Planet Foundation.
Within fifteen more years he controlled all of the civilized universe, having subjugated the colonies in the Regulus, Fomalhaut, Pollux, Aldebaran, Altair, Procryon, Arctures and Capella Sectors. He established new colonies near Archermar, the furthest mankind had yet been from Mother Earth.
He called himself Emperor, built on the gray planet, Lobos, a mighty palace and fortress, protected by the impenetrable ring of satellite warships.
In the shining palace he begat the sons who carried his name and his authority. During three hundred years of the reign of the line of Kane, research for the sake of knowledge ceased to exist. All research was channeled toward the single goal of making the Empire immune to attack, both from within and from without—for men yet feared the possibility of intelligent and warlike races in some yet unconquered comer of the universe.
Yet mankind benefited from the single-minded lust for power of the Empire, for it was through the insistence of the Kanes that the mighty spaceships plunged through the barrier of the speed of light with the lateral time movement aberration cancelled down to the point where it was so slight as to be recorded only by the most delicate instruments.
And the Empire, searching the far comers of the universe, fomund that no enemy was in opposition and they yet lusted for war, as no dictatorship can exist without war.
Bannot, the Ninth in the Succession, turned his attention to past eras m search of a worthy foe.
Ibid
Chapter IV
They Come to Kill
They did not come the following dawn—or the next.
Joe Gresham had gradually taken over authority from Howard Loomis, yet he deferred to the judgment of Mary Callahan when he was in doubt. The headquarters cave was forty feet from the narrow valley floor, reached by a narrow ledge.
Joe summed up their plan. “We’ll try to dicker with these jokers, but if they won’t listen we better be ready. It’s no use running. This is as good a place as we’ll find.”
During the two full days of preparation, Mary canceled all attempts at surprise weapons. She pointed up at the hovering boxes and said, “Whatever we do we’ll be watched.”
At the end of the second day there were six heavy bows. Stacey, pale and upset, displayed a remarkable talent for fashioning arrows. For the sake of speed the tips were fire-hardened. Joe had carried up the rocks. Howard Loomis had fashioned the spears, had made a sling, had traveled to the stream bed to gather small stones for the sling.
Water storage was a problem, unhappily solved by using the hides of the small deer-like creatures to fashion waterbags. Improper curing of the hides gave the water an evil smell, a worse taste.
The initial attack came on the third dawn.
Stacey was on watch at the cave mouth near the embers of the dead fire. Her scream jolted the other three out of sleep.
There were four of them. They stood on the brow of the hill opposite the cliff face. They were a good hundred and fifty yards away, the sun silhouetting them.
Mary shaded her eyes and frowned. “A ham act,” she said. “A walk-on part Spear-carriers. Something out of Shakespeare. J. Caesar, maybe.”
The four, even at that distance, looked trim and young. They wore the crested helmets of antiquity, carried oval shields, short swords, unscabbarded. The sun glinted off the silver of their shields, the naked blades, the breastplates, the metallic thongs binding their husky legs.
They merely stood and watched.
“Armor, yet,” Joe muttered. “What good are wooden arrows going to be?”
Stacey began to moan.
“Shut up, honey,” Mary said softly.
The four men advanced down the slope with cautious steps. As they reached the valley floor their tanned faces were upturned toward the face of the cliff. They wore short stout war axes suspended from their belts.
And above each of them floated a small metallic box.
They seemed wary but confident. Joe growled deep in his throat, backed into the shadow, notched one of the best arrows on the bowstring of the heaviest bow, pulled it back until his thumb touched his cheek, just under his right eye. His big arms trembled slightly with the strain.
He released the arrow. It sped down, whizzing toward the biggest of the four. The man raised his shield with startled speed. The arrow penetrated halfway through the shield. The big man staggered back, lowering his shield. A thin line of blood ran down his cheek. He shouted something in a foreign tongue, a wide smile on his face. With a careless flick of his short sword, he lopped off the protruding arrow.
Howard shouted, his voice shrilled, “What do you want?”
The answer was in English, oddly accented. “To kill you!”
“He couldn’
t have made it clearer,” Mary said.
“Come on and try,” Joe yelled.
The four, shields high, inched toward the narrow ledge that wound up to the wide place in front of the cave mouth.
“Let ‘em get nearly up here,” Joe muttered.
They were so close that the shields overlapped, giving the impression of a vast metallic beetle crawling up the rock.
Joe selected a rock that had taken him much effort to lug up to the cave. His big arms corded with the effort as he lifted it, staying back out of sight Mary peered over the edge.
She signaled to Joe. He held the rock over his head, stumbled as he came rushing forward.
It took him precious seconds to regain his balance.
The hundred-pound stone crashed down among them. A man yelled in pain as he was smashed against the ledge. Two men fell off, tumbling down into the brush.
But the lead man, the one with the punctured cheek, scrambled up the last ten feet, throwing aside his shield.
He stood enormous in front of the cave, his sword flashing, the war axe in his huge left hand. His mouth was open in a wide grin of battle. Joe charged him with one of the spears but the sword lopped off the spear, along with Joe’s first finger and thumb.
Joe fell back. Mary flattened against the inside wall of the cave, stooped and picked up a half pound rock. Her tomboy girlhood had left cunning in her muscles. The rock hit the broad forehead. The man dropped sword and axe, dropped to his knees, his eyes glazed.
Joe took two steps forward and kicked the man in the face. He went over backward, dropped out of sight.
Two of the attackers were uninjured. They had recovered their shields, which they used to protect the injured man who had been hit by the stone Joe dropped among them. They disappeared down the valley into the brush.
The dead giant lay at the foot of the cliff.
They rekindled a fire from the embers while Joe held his right wrist clamped with his strong left hand. With the heated sword blade, Mary seared the stumps of finger and thumb. Joe screamed like a woman. Stacey sat with the face of one slowly going mad. She rocked from side to side and smiled foolishly.
Joe went to the dark interior of the cave and immediately fell into a deep sleep. Howard paced restlessly. Mary sat and watched the valley floor.
In mid-afternoon of the short day, the two uninjured ones made a concerted rush, looped a vine over the foot of the one who had died and dragged him off into the brush. As they did so, one of them glanced up at Mary.
He was dark, lean, powerfully built. But she noticed that there was a contradiction in his face. It had a specific sensibility, sensitivity. He had the look of a man who detested what he was doing.
Long after he had disappeared, she thought about him.
When Bannot, the Ninth Emperor Kane, ordered the court scientists to bring worthy foes from past eras, he had not sufficient training to realize, that his request violated the first rule of space travel. Were any man to be taken from a past era the fact of his disappearance would make appreciable change in the future. As the future had already been determined, any effort to alter the past by removing a specific living being would be doomed to failure.
But the court scientists knew that to fail meant death. Their researches carried them far afield. Many of them died painfully when the promises they made to Bannot were not fulfilled within the time interval allotted.
Court secrecy was such that posterity will never know which man it was who first brought a living being from a past era to his own time. His method was dependent upon scanning the person at the moment of death, thus assuring that there would be no specific effect on the past. The lateral movement in time of the person thus transported caused an actual physical split, so that the lifeless duplication of the body remained in the past world.
When the method was first disclosed there was an outcry from the philosophers and from the church, though both institutions had been carefully emasculated by the Kanes.
Bannot, in the week before his death, handled the outcry in typical fashion. He not only ordered the assassination of the more outspoken but explained to the peoples of all planets, in tones of sweet reasonableness, that these persons were not living, even though they seemed to be alive, as they had actually died in times long gone.
When Bannot felt death upon him he ordered the same technique to be used on him after his death, to return a few days to the past and bring him into a new life.
But Bannot died of an exceedingly painful disease, the result of past dissipations. His eldest son, who hated him, found that Bannot could be brought back, only to die again, in agony, within hours.
His eldest so7i extended those hours into a full year before at last tiring of the game and taking over the golden throne.
Ibid
Chapter V
Battle-Ax Berserk
At dawn the next day, four attackers stood as before on the brow of the opposite hill.
Joe, his right arm badly swollen, laughed mirthlessly. “We kill one and cripple one and there’s still four. A nice game they have.”
“That’s what it is, Joe,” Mary said ‘flatly. “A game. People who can make those little boxes that follow you around could do better than swords. This is like the old Roman amphitheatre. Those guys are gladiators. It’s a big game with the boxes watching. Maybe the boxes flash the battle on screens. Home movies for the public. Hired entertainers.”
Stacey had grown worse during the night. She sat with the empty smile on her lips and her eyes were far away.
Howard said, licking his lips, “Mary, do you think they could have . . .”
“For my money, yes. They want fun, so they grab us somehow just as we get knocked off and here we are and they have their fun.”
“It—it’s horrible!” Howard said.
“It ain’t pretty,” Mary agreed.
Howard said, “Why don’t we just—well—hold our hands up. If we don’t give them any sport, maybe they’ll—”
“A lot I can do with one hand,” Joe said. “Maybe it’s worth a try.”
Mary stood up, her lips compressed. “No dice, boys. These kids are bloodthirsty. I think they’d like to cut our throats. Why give them the brass ring?”
“What makes you so sure you’re right, Callahan?” Howard asked.
“Take a look,” she said tersely.
The four were advancing across the valley floor as cautiously as their predecessors. Mary looked closely. No, two of them were the same as the day before—the uninjured two, including the dark one with the look of disgust in his eyes.
There was nothing reassuring about their advance.
Howard said, “I still think it’s—”
With a shrill scream Stacey bounded to her feet, shouldering between Mary and Howard. Though she had always been careful on the ledge she ran down at reckless speed. Mary picked herself up off the floor.
“Stacey!” Howard called after her. “Stacey, darling!”
He started to go after her. Joe caught him, held him, said, “Shut up and we’ll see if your plan works. You couldn’t catch her in time anyway.”
They stood and watched the blond girl. This Stacey Murdock was grotesquely changed from the girl who had demanded that they get in touch with Daddy.
Her tan skin was scratched and torn, her hair dirty, her feet scarred by the rocks. She ran toward the four men, her hands outstretched. They heard her panting voice, her incoherent pleading. The lead man dropped sword and shield. Stacey ran to him. Mary saw the dark man make a move toward the lead man as though to object. But it was too late.
As Stacey ran toward the man’s arms he sidestepped her. As she ran by him he caught her blond hair, yanked her backward off her feet. She fell with the small of her back across his bent knee. With one arm across her throat, the other across her hips, he snapped her back like a brittle stick.
He stood up and Mary could see the look of revulsion on his face as though he had disliked touching her. Stacey lay gro
tesquely bent. The man nudged her with his foot and the four of them looked up at the cave mouth.
Howard Loomis gave an incoherent yell, grabbed the battle axe from the floor and was gone before either Mary or Joe could stop him.
Still yelling in rage and the lust to kill, Howard Loomis, ex-salesman of Briskies, charged the four helmeted warriors.
Mary’s throat tightened at the sight of his hopeless bravery.
By the pure fury of his attack he drove the two men back into their companions.
The slashing axe bounced off shield, rang off helmet, a bright arc in the morning light.
Three men dropped back. One of them faced Howard, parried his blows, waiting for the inevitable pause when Howard grew armweary.
With the short sword, as Howard’s axe sagged, he spitted him carefully through the middle, twisting the wide blade to let air into the wound.
Howard fell onto his face, toppled over onto his side. The swordsman looked triumphantly up at the cave mouth. As he did so, Howard, with one last convulsive effort of the axe he still clutched, hacked at the swordsman’s leg as one would hack at a tree. The axe severed muscle and tendon and artery.
“Good boy!” Joe whispered.
They staunched the flow of blood and one of them helped the injured man down the valley. The remaining two, the dark one and another one, stared up at the cave.
“They’ll wait for their pal,” Joe said.
“No. This thing seems to be run by rules. I say that if there are two of us left they’ll only toss in two of them.”
The two warriors moved cautiously toward the ledge, their shields high, their swords held tightly.
In the beginning a vast planet called Thor was earmarked and set aside for the wars between the soldiers of Kane and the soldiers of the past.
