“I do,” he replied simply. “What is wrong about that? But you want to marry Joel, and all I really want is—”
She put a cool finger against his lips. “I know, I know.” She puckered her smooth forehead thoughtfully. “You must forget about going back to Voranamor, Helsing.”
“Why must I?”
“Don’t you see, poor dear? You’ve been cared for so thoroughly by the robots, you are practically incapable of caring for yourself. Why, the thing even fed you with a spoon, until I taught you different! And, if you hadn’t got very angry tonight—angry enough to fight your own battle—you might even have let Alur fight for you! I think it’s the first time in your life you have been angry. I also think, if you do go back to Voranamor, you will die there…and that will be the end of your race, won’t it?
“Yes,” he agreed miserably.
“I can see Voranamor now,” she said dreamily, “just by closing my eyes. Robots everywhere, thick as fleas. Haven’t you any idea what made your race die out, Helsing?… Too much service! They died of plain boredom!”
He regarded her gloomily. “That is probably true. But dead though it is, Voranamor is my world. There is nothing here for me, except fighting…feelings I don’t understand…anger!”
“Anger!” she cried. “Anger is good, Helsing! We of Earth are an angry people! Anger has built the world we know and love. Anger against terrorism made us band together into nations; and anger against oppression made us free! When man has nothing more to anger him, nothing more to make him rise up and fight… Well, we Earthmen aren’t dying out, Helsing!” She paused. “We don’t have robots, either.” Alur moved self-consciously, gleaming in the moonlight. “I think she wants you to stay, Helsing.”
Helsing looked at the robot helplessly. “How can I do that?”
“Marry her and find out.”
Helsing looked a question at Allene.
She nodded. “I think… Alur is right, Helsing.”
Helsing turned back to the robot. “What are you waiting for?”
“Your permission to serve,” said the robot humbly.
Helsing felt Allene’s hand clasped in both of his. Her flesh was firm between his palms.
“Serve me then no longer,” said Helsing. “Go back to Voranamor.”
The robot turned. From the forest path came the humming of a worn gear, faint sound that diminished into silence. Helsing looked stricken. He started to his feet, took a step after Alur. He felt Allene’s tug on his arm.
He said, looking down at her, “You couldn’t have meant it!”
“But I did! Yes… I did, my dear. For a while, I didn’t know. You were so helpless…so… I don’t know what. I pitied you. Then…what you did to Joel showed that your manhood isn’t all on the surface. I know now you have the quality I want…in the man I love!”
Helsing didn’t know what to do, so Allene did it for him. His first kiss was an experience, unexpected, unsought, vital, satisfying. Instinct helped. He put his arms around her and held her close.
He said, “Alur is gone, and I shall be sorry for it. But it does not matter, now that I have you, Allene. Not even the secret I was looking for matters.
She squeezed him joyfully, happily. “We’ll get around to that, too,” she murmured, and kissed him again.
MAGNANTHROPUS
Originally published in Fantastic Stories of Imagination, September-October 1961.
CHAPTER 1
The muscles of Jefferson Jarvis’ thin, hawk-like face sagged with fatigue, accentuating the harsh lines furrowing from nostrils to the corners of bleak lips. Hunched at the wheel, he gripped it with hands like talons, his eyes glazed in a semi-hypnosis as the super highway unwound ahead of the atom car.
He had been driving two days and a night with atomic engine at full flux. His body was taut with strain, and the heat beaded his forehead and jutting jawline with sweat.
But more than the heat brought sweat to his flesh… Eamus Brock! Where was Eamus Brock—would he be able to find him? Did it matter, whether he did or did not?
Eamus Brock’s identity was not the puzzle to Jarvis that his whereabouts was. Brock was listed in all the appropriate source books, from the Encyclopedia Britannica to Dun & Bradstreet. But the picture of a man’s civic and financial standing is not a picture of the man himself, and there was a familiarity about the name of Eamus Brock that did not seem to Jarvis a part of his externally acquired experience.
Brock had written him a letter, offering him a job. How long ago? He couldn’t remember, and he had thrown the letter away. And now he was frantic to find Eamus Brock and take that job. Why? That was a question he could not answer. He only knew that a kind of frenzy burned inside him, a madness that would not be at peace unless he found Eamus Brock.
“At the present time I am not at liberty to explain,” Brock had written. “But I need you, and I am sure you need what I am offering you. Others are with me in carrying out my plans. Write. I will furnish expenses.”
Jarvis hadn’t written. And now, the desire to find Eamus Brock was like a thirst in his soul, and he could not say why.
* * * *
Jarvis stopped for the night at a dingy hotel in a small, mid-western town. The muggy darkness was split and reddened with a faint, far-off thunderstorm as he dropped into sleep. And then, abruptly, the sound crescendoed and the thunder that shook him awake was as if the very stones had tongues and screamed, and screaming, shattered. The world rocked and the wind shrieked across the empty air-spaces, and pandemonium dwelt in ecstasy upon the land.
The first lurch of the hotel flung Jarvis out of bed, against the wall, where he lay, snatched from sleep, but stunned and bruised. Bricks burst from the face of the building in a fusillade of sound. A hot gale shrilled through rooms open suddenly to the foetid night, and the steel skeleton of the building writhed on its foundations.
The plaster ceiling dropped, hammering Jarvis to the suddenly tilted floor. He lurched across the room, grasped the windowsill, and pulled himself up against the shuddering force of earthquake. The glass was shattered, but no breath of air came through the window. In the dark, he felt leaves and twigs there, and groping, contacted a limb thrust into his room. The quake, he thought, had toppled a tree against the building. A dank, hothouse odor breathed into the room.
Blackness was like cotton pressed against his eyeballs. His fingers ached from gripping the window-sill to keep from falling back into the room. He shivered with a chill in spite of the humid warmth.
Then the detonations of thunder diminished, grumbled into distance and sporadic bursts of clatter. The world had gone through bombardment and had died. The quiet was the quiet of the grave.
He let himself slide down the tilted floor, dug his clothes out of the welter of smashed furniture and dressed, waiting for the light, waiting for sound—waiting for anything at all to assure him he had not also died with the rest of the world.
* * * *
Gray day filtered through the greenery-choked window at last. Jarvis’ clothing was drenched with nervous sweat as he grasped the limb and pulled himself along it toward the light.
The limb swelled in girth, connected to a trunk. It was only barely light, but he sensed the massiveness of the tree in which he crouched perhaps thirty feet off the ground.
Daybreak was not altogether quiet. Occasionally, the earth tremored and an explosion, near or far, detonated on the air.
He clung to his perch, reviewing an ill spent life and wondering if it was worthwhile to hope for the best. His mouth held a stale taste—the taste of fear, which he had learned well during the year he spent in the House of Correction when he was fifteen years old. He had revolted then, and they had put him through the “treatment”. A few decades earlier, it had been called brainwashing, but in Jarvis’ day, the world had lost in
crudeness of expression what it had gained in the refinement of fear.
Even at fifteen, he had not been a conformist. He still was not, but now he knew better than to let it become apparent. They had taken him and had broken him—turned him outwardly into a model citizen of the State. But inwardly, the turmoil of revolt still frothed in his veins.
A boy under twenty and a man over forty-five had one thing in common—neither was allowed to work. Automation, of course, made it unnecessary for them to work, and the class between the two ages had little to do other than punch buttons. The government gave you a living whether or not you could, or would earn it—so who cared to work? Only a recalcitrant few—and at fifteen, Jarvis had lied about his age (successfully, owing to the curiously gnome-like, old-man look of his wizened features) and had taken a job.
For that, when discovered, he had been sentenced to the House of Correction—a bitter year that would remain forever in his memory.
He thought of Eamus Brock and felt a twinge of disgust with himself for having thrown away Brock’s letter. There had been an address on it, but no trick of memory stimulation would bring it back to him. For that he had to thank the House of Correction and its “treatment”.
Why had he rebelled and failed—in a world of conformism? Struggling, over the years with this question had etched bitter lines in his face—deeper and more rugged from realization of the terror behind the benevolence of government, and the Credo of State: “The people must not think!”
From somewhere came the sound of water geysering from a ruptured main, and the light grew stronger little by little. The ground was dimly visible below, littered with broken fragments of a shattered world. The furrowed bark of the tree, hard as a sheath of metal, offered an easy descent. He felt heavy, sluggish, terribly fatigued, as he climbed down.
On the ground, no more was visible than had been from above. He moved cautiously, crouched, stealthy, ridden by a feeling of imminent peril he could not displace. There was a forest of trees all around him—trees that certainly had not been there last night when he had driven into town and registered at the hotel.
Trees sprang up from cracks and fissures in the shattered pavement, grew up through riven buildings, and arched and interlaced their leafy branches into an impenetrable screen overhead. He moved at random among house-size trunks whose tops towered a dizzying, unknown distance into the invisible sky.
There were dead among the ruins, many of them, but no sign of anyone living. The air was hot, choking, sickening with the fetor of decaying vegetation and of bodies already beginning to rot in the cauldron of steaming air.
The air screamed in front of him, and a shattering explosion knocked him on his back. He blinked dust from smarting eyes and crawled painfully to his feet. Another tree stood where none had been a moment before, dull green leaves still trembling—with the vigor of instantaneous growth? Where had that tree come from?
He ran, thinking of nothing but escape from danger, fell bruised, shaken and sobbing into a fathom-deep fissure, and lay there, wedged, spent, broken with misery and fear of the unknown.
Later, he pulled himself painfully out of the crack in the ground, emotionally calm, better able to survey his situation and judge its outcome. This was terrible reality, not a dream. He picked his way among rubble littering the forest floor and smelled the smoke of burning houses.
He heard a whimper and stopped, probing the air for further sound. Then he saw the boy—a pajama-clad figure sobbing face down on the remains of a lawn, beside a tree-riven house. Jarvis’ eyes raked the wreckage, noted furniture and shapeless rags wedged among the branches, started with horror at the thing in a bloody nightgown that dangled in midair, transfixed by a six-inch branch. His face livid, he dropped to one knee beside the boy.
“Are you hurt, fella?”
The boy only cried. He coaxed words out of him—only sounds at first, then words, one at a time, broken. The boy had lived in this tragic wreckage when it had been whole. His name was Toby Carter, and something Jarvis knew, he was the only one left alive out of a family of five.
Tenderly, Jarvis lifted the boy, carried him to a clearing, and left him there while he went back to search the wreckage for clothes. Dressed and walking at Jarvis’ side, the boy was dry-eyed, but his head drooped and the thoughts of sadness trooping through his brain were mirrored in his round, little-boy features.
“I’m your folks now, Toby,” Jarvis consoled him. “At least, until we find somebody who can do a better job than I. You see, I’ve got no folks, either, Toby, so you will have to be mine. I’ve been alone in the world a lot of years, and I can tell you it’s something you get used to.”
“Why did it happen, Jeff?” Toby put in suddenly.
“What?” Jarvis knew what. The sound was only a defense against the numbness that question brought shocking against his heart.
“The trees, Jeff. Where did they come from and why? Why are all the people dead? Who did this, Jeff, and why?”
Jarvis groaned silently. “If I knew that, Toby, I’d know a lot of other things, too, which I don’t know at all. Let’s not ask questions for now. We’ve just got to accept that the trees are here and suppose that they got here naturally and honestly. Just how we’ll probably find out later. Does that satisfy you?”
CHAPTER 2
The highway edging the town was ripped and torn by the forest, littered with smashed automobiles and broken people—people who lived. They dragged themselves with a peculiar heavy-footedness in a straggling line of refugees, burdened with belongings.
They had not been prepared for this, Jarvis thought, watching. They had learned to spool tapes and push buttons, but they had not learned to think. And now they were incapable of knowing what to do beyond following the one in front, going anywhere, going nowhere, just going.
Jarvis appealed to a highway patrol officer, standing impassively by his wrecked patrol car.
He said, “Officer—what’s happened?” Then he felt silly for having voiced the question. He cleared his throat. “I found a homeless kid…”
The officer looked down at Toby, up at Jarvis. He shook his head.
“I can’t do anything for you. I don’t know any more than you do. My radio is dead. You better go south with the others.”
Jarvis turned away, tugging Toby’s hand. There was a scuffle in the trickle of humanity and he paused. Three men had seized the arms of a young girl and were forcing her to go with them, away from the others, into the trees. She was pretty, well formed, but now her face held the stamp of terror and her slim body arched away from the men with the tautness of a steel spring. They were laughing and pulling, not pleasantly, and one of them prodded her.
Jarvis turned to the policeman. “You’re a cop.” Bitterly. “You going to let them do that?”
The policeman shrugged, then squared his shoulders. He sneered at Jarvis.
“A man don’t have to be a cop to resent something like that—just a man!”
He shouted at the men and moved toward them. One of the men released his hold on the girl and grinned at the cop. He laughed jeeringly.
“Go on, dude! That badge don’t mean nothing now!”
The policeman’s hand went to the pistol at his waist, but the thug moved more swiftly. A needle automatic nosed out of his pocket and pinged sharply. The officer spun half around, his left arm flailing the air. He tugged at the butt of his pistol as he fell, and the needier pinged again.
Jarvis grabbed Toby into his arms and plunged backward into the underbrush. He hadn’t the stomach to travel with a mob like that, and he could not turn Toby over to one of these dispirited folk for probable desertion.
“He killed that policeman, didn’t he?” Toby said.
Jarvis did not want to discuss it. He said, “I’ll bet you haven’t had any breakfast, have you? Neither h
ave I, and we better find some pretty quick.”
The sound of the mob moving along the ruined highway was a continuous murmur behind them. The underbrush hid them, but he felt exposed on the ground. The forest ceiling was an almost impenetrable barrier against the light and they stood in dimness. Many of the branches overhead were ten feet and more thick, butted to trunks having the girth of a gas storage tank, and he could only guess at the immensity of their height.
He went on, “If we climb a tree and walk along the limbs, we’ll be safer than here on the ground. Think you could do that without falling off?”
“If you can, I can, Jeff.” There was quiet assurance in the boy’s tone.
“Good boy!” Jarvis patted his shoulder and squeezed.
The airy level at which they trod was as solid as a highway. The branches were so thoroughly interwoven, they could make speedy progress from tree to tree and never once have to descend. Jarvis led Toby briskly along the limbs toward the center of town. Once there, he found a suitable crotch and peered groundward, nervously alert for movement. There was nothing but litter, rubble, and sprawled bodies. From nearby came the sound of water, geysering from the main, which he had heard earlier. The sound helped him orient himself.
He said, “You stay here until I get back and keep out of sight. Don’t let anybody see you. You understand me?”
“Sure,” Toby replied. “I’ll hide among the leaves, like me and Eamus Brock used to when we played.”
Jarvis teetered on the branch. He half expected the boy to be looking at him with a mocking expression, but Toby was serious.
“Eamus Brock? Who’s that?” he asked tunelessly.
“A kid I used to know… I think. I… I don’t remember him so well. It seems like an awful long time ago. We used to walk in the fields and the woods and talk…”
“What did you talk about?”
“I don’t remember, Jeff. Just talk.”
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 57
