The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister

by Banister, Manly

  “I discovered the ruined cities of the Mighty on Eloraspon, and in one, in the southern hemisphere, I found the records of those ancients. Those records are still there, engraved in eternal thought upon subterranean walls of what once was the mightiest of all mighty cities.

  “I read those records left by supermen, and found that their minds were more than devices for thinking. They were conceptual integrators, able to formulate a concept and create from it. From those records, I learned the things that made me rich on Earth and provided me with the money I required to continue my investigation of Eloraspon. I worked for many years, unraveling the records, but I could encompass only a few in all that time. Of the rest, I have made transcriptions, and these, future generations will have to decipher.

  “The concept of simultaneous universes was not a strange one to the Mighty. More, they were cognizant of the danger inherent in the instability of such simultaneity. They knew that the least overbalance of one force upon another could precipitate an alien world, or its entire system, into this universe. Eloraspon was only one such precariously balanced world.

  “They were familiar with Earth as it was then, too. It was a wild, rank, steaming planet, peopled by brainless saurians. And conceptual integration forecast for them an imminent merger of Earth and Eloraspon. They could not predict what would happen when the merger took place, but they could reason what probably would happen. They feared a nova, as the dense mass of the Elorasponian sun attempted to merge with the equally dense mass of the terrestrial sun.

  “They made plans to leave their world, and they built tremendous ships to carry them. But there were some who refused to leave their homes, preferring certain destruction to the certainty they would face in the void of space. Those who departed never returned. The descendants of those who remained are the Eeima, the Sea People, the Bronze Men of Surandanish, and many others. The spirits of these present inhabitants remember still the god-like qualities of the Mighty, but their minds have long since degenerated and their spirits have developed along narrow paths of individuality.

  “But the dreaded nova feared by the Mighty did not occur. That is why we can be here today. Do you know what a nova is?”

  Jarvis knew, but only the effect of one. Brock explained that a nova is caused whenever a sun from simultaneous space merges with a sun of terrestrial space. In the dense heart of a star, he pointed out, there is no such thing as inter-atomic space. The protons, stripped of their electrons, are packed together in a furnace of incalculable heat and pressure.

  The universe contains many nova-type stars, Brock said. Terrestrial astronomers learned long ago to classify them spectroscopically. The bright-line spectrum of Earth’s own sun, even, was found to be quite similar to that of known nova-type stars. Up to the destruction of Earth, many theories had raged concerning the cause of novae. In some cases, Brock declared, the space strain was periodic in nature, producing a cycle of mergence and drawing apart, and this manifestation of cyclic instability resulted in the waxing and waning of light output of variable stars. Not all stars, however, could be novae. The condition is limited to unstable points in the Universe.

  Unfortunately, Jarvis realized, Mankind happened to inhabit one of those points of instability.

  “That is the danger we face now,” Brock assured him grimly. “What did not happen in the days of the Mighty is bound to happen now—unless we prevent it. You have noticed how bright is the sun—how warm is the season, which is actually midwinter! At this altitude, we should be buried deep in snow! Very soon, now, the balance will be fully overcome. There will be a mergence of suns…and nova!”

  Jarvis felt sickness throbbing in his stomach.

  “Can’t you do something? You are Eamus Brock!” he cried.

  “Even the Mighty of old fled before the danger,” Brock reminded him, “and they were many. We are doing what we can—no adult Mag sleeps. Our brains are twenty-four hours a day on the job. If there is a way to defeat destiny, we shall find it. I have that faith…in God and Magnanthropus!”

  CHAPTER 18

  Jarvis lived in the village, with Jo, and went to “school” in the city. Brock had not been willing to grant him that, until he had explained that Jo was pregnant.

  “Your child will be a Mag, like you,” Brock had told him. “That is a point we must not neglect, whether we are trapped by the nova or not. Think of it, Jarvis—a child of your own! A newborn infant, born to the destiny of Magnanthropus!”

  “If the sun turns nova,” Jarvis pointed out bleakly, “it won’t matter if my child is a throwback to the Tertiary apes.”

  “We must continue to rear our children, and teach them,” Brock said solemnly, “even if we had absolute proof the sun will nova tomorrow.”

  It was the unborn child, then, that gave Jarvis extra privilege. Brock insisted that Toby remain in the city.

  “I have said,” Brock told him kindly, “that I have made plans for you. If those plans should bear fruit, you will profit from living in the village. As for Toby, he is mine. I accept him among my people. He must learn swiftly what it is to be a Mag.”

  It irked Jarvis, living in the village, among the villagers whom he counted as his own people, to be able to say nothing of the impending nova. Brock had sworn him to silence and secrecy. He must not speak of it, even to Jo. He understood, of course, Brock’s concern for secrecy. It would do no good to upset the villagers with that information, and there was nothing they could do to avert doom. Only Brock and his Magnanthropi had the potential power to turn aside the intention of Fate…if they could exercise it in time!

  It did not take Jarvis long to realize that Mitch was his friend, even though the lanky engineer had expressed bitterness at discovering him to be a Mag. It was he who suggested that Jarvis be admitted to the governing board of the village, and so Jarvis became junior member of the village council.

  “Mitch, why don’t you trust the Mags?” Jarvis asked him.

  Mitch scratched his lean jaw. “Not so much the Mags as Eamus Brock, Jeff. Remember—he kept the truth from us—when he brought us here.”

  “That was to save your life!”

  “Even so, it was a lie. I think he would lie again if he thought it was for our own good.”

  “What could he possibly be lying about now?”

  Mitch shrugged. “We hear a lot of silence out of the City of Brock these days. What are they covering up? I’ve even hinted to you a few times, and you close up like a clam. What kind of a lie is it that’s too big to be uttered?”

  Jarvis felt flustered. “Look, Mitch. You’re wrong! Brock isn’t hiding any lies, and he isn’t covering up. There’s a lot of work to getting started off right in a new world. The Mags have a lot of problems they’re working out—”

  “I’ll bet they have,” Mitch agreed morosely.

  “However you feel about it, Mitch, the Mags are a race of supermen. They can do a lot for you and the rest of humanity on Eloraspon. Give them time.”

  “Homo sapiens had a million years,” Mitch said pointedly, “and what did he ever do for the apes?”

  “Our case is different—”

  “Different? Oh, yes, it’s different! And how it is! You’ve tried time after time to tell me what it’s like in there—in the city—and I still haven’t the least idea. Different? We live in totally separate worlds, you and I!”

  “I live here in the village with you!”

  “Because you’re married to a Sap!” Mitch interjected heatedly. “Oh, I know, Jeff—I know what you’d like for me to think, and believe me, I wish I could think that way. But I understand the people in the village—they’re my kind. I don’t understand you and yours. Half the stuff you try to tell me about the Mags sounds like double-talk to me. Promise me one thing, Jeff. Don’t try to help us, will you? You just sit on the council and keep your intellige
nt mug shut. Will you do that for me?”

  Jarvis grinned, and sealed the agreement with a handshake.

  * * * *

  The first council meeting with Jarvis sitting in was not a success. His chief opposition was a man named Saylo—Gardner Saylo, formerly mathematician at a small, midwestern college. He was a small man with a thin, sallow face, black moustached, yet obviously middle-aged. Saylo could have been a man who had nourished ambitions, Jarvis thought—to be college president—to be another Einstein, maybe. Now he possessed the highest rank he would ever have—council member for a village of less than a thousand people.

  Harper was Saylo’s friend—Roy Harper, big, humorless, red-faced. He seconded Saylo’s dislike for Jarvis.

  Saylo made a motion to reserve governing privileges in the village to the species homo sapiens, and Harper seconded it. The other five members, excluding Jarvis, voted it down.

  The incident was not noticeably large, but it impressed Jarvis. He felt like a hobo sitting in a council of apes and rejected for his effeteness. Those who had voted him in had done so out of friendship for Mitch.

  After the meeting, Mitch said, “You expected that play from somebody, didn’t you? I knew something like that would be forthcoming—believe me, I know my homo sapiens—hoof, hide, hair, horn and claw, I know him.”

  “You’re being unfair to your own people, Mitch.”

  “Unfair, am I? Look, Jeff—you’re a Mag, and you don’t understand. No man of homo sapiens has ever fully trusted another. Where do you suppose we got our rituals of hat-tipping and hand-shaking? These are no more than wary signs, saying, ‘For the moment, you are safe from me’. Why, men have competed against each other since the Year One, and they always will compete. You Mags have no idea of what competition is—it’s completely foreign to your nature. So don’t forgive Saylo and Harper for making fools of themselves. They don’t deserve it!”

  In the weeks that followed, Jarvis interspersed moments of anxiety concerning the approaching doom of nova with nostalgic reminiscences of their trek across the face of Eloraspon, his and Jo’s and Toby’s. Life in the village, he thought, was only more of what he had tried to run away from on Earth. Only now he was enmeshed too deeply to pull out. There was no place to go from here, and he had Jo and his unborn child to hold him fast.

  The villagers had always assumed that he and Jo were legally married. They were married, as far as Jarvis was concerned, and Jo, too. So they never disabused the villagers’ minds of the notion.

  Meanwhile, he attended classes of “instruction” in Brock’s city. He learned more and more of what it was to be a Mag, yet realizing that his progress was slow, because he could not spend all his time in the city.

  Still, he learned a few basic mental techniques. He learned to distinguish the thought-tones of things, the subtle emanations arising from the interstitial vibrations of the thought matrix that underlay form. He learned to “hear” the song of the city in the depths of his soul, to know the melodies of water, wood, stone and other substances. These things were taught him in a precise way, along the lines of a theory in harmonics, by means for which he was required to memorize the frequencies of only a few elements. Then, by interpolation, he could intersperse the others with remarkable accuracy. Then he was taught a method of analysis, by means of which he was enabled to break down complex tones into their elements, thus revealing the nature of compound substances—water, for instance, was a combination of the thought-tones of hydrogen and oxygen. He was on the threshold of being able to “see” without eyes.

  What was more important to him, though, was to be able to shut out these subliminal radiations when he wished. After that, he could really enjoy silence in his soul.

  On one of his infrequent visits with Brock, Jarvis brought up the subject weighing on his mind.

  “Aren’t we going to say anything to the villagers about the nova?”

  “Not until the time is ripe for it,” Brock assured him.

  “Do you think of them as apes?” Jarvis asked suddenly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Apes. I said once to Mitch that the Mags could do a lot for homo sapiens. He asked me what homo sapiens, in a million years of existence, had ever done for the apes.”

  “Sometimes they caged them,” Brock put in dryly. “Would you like me to do that to your villagers?”

  “I don’t mean that. But isn’t that what you’re doing by holding back knowledge of the catastrophe ahead?”

  “You worry more than is good for you, Jeff. I think you will fit nicely into my plans. You will have to worry a lot to do what I have in mind for you.”

  “And what is that?”

  Brock waved a negligent hand. “All in good time. Do you feel you are progressing in your studies?”

  “Not as fast as I should like.”

  “But fast enough, nonetheless,” Brock assured him. “You cannot be hasty.”

  “But you say there is so little time left before the sun erupts. How close have you come to finding a way to avert it?”

  “I won’t inflate your hopes, Jeff. Remember what I said about if we knew the sun must surely nova tomorrow. We must also keep on working toward averting it. Listen to me—it was the Carboniferous Age on Earth when the Mighty migrated from Eloraspon to escape disaster. They built their thousands of spaceships, believing that those ships would permit them to flee before the nova took place.”

  “It’s obvious they figured the nova wrong. It never happened.”

  “Is it so obvious?”

  “The solar system is still here, Eamus! You could be wrong, too, you know. If the Mighty were as mighty as you say, surely they could be even more accurate than you and this handful of Mags? Eloraspon may yet swing back into its own universe without help, and there would be no nova.”

  Brock looked exasperated. “You possess a few of homo sapiens’ traits for specious argument that will probably never be weeded out of you,” he reprimanded. “The sun will nova because it must. At the time of the migration of the Mighty, it had also to nova, and it would have except for…”

  “Except for what?” Jarvis wanted to know.

  “Have you noticed the unfinished tower at the eastern edge of the city?” Brock asked irrelevantly.

  “I’ve noticed Mags working on it.”

  “It will soon be finished. That is our spaceship, exact in every way to one of those ancient spaceships of the Mighty. But it is only one.”

  “You couldn’t be planning to remove everyone from Eloraspon before the nova!”

  “Correct. I plan no such thing at all.”

  A horrible suspicion bred itself in Jarvis’s brain.

  “Then why are you building a spaceship?”

  “This spaceship is not a simple shell of metal into which you might cram a thousand or more human beings, along with supplies for many years’ journey. It is a complex thing, Jeff, like no spaceship any man of homo sapiens ever imagined. We could not transport one human being in it, let alone many. It will not even hold air.”

  “Then of what use is it? Why are you building it?”

  “For ourselves, Jeff—for Magnanthropus. There is no material substance in any part of that tapering hull. What you see is only a matrix, a mould for thought. In a certain sense, it is no more than a sponge that will hold, not water, but the minds of Magnanthropus. When we leave Eloraspon, we must leave our bodies behind…with the people in the village.”

  “Why do you do this thing?” Jarvis demanded bitterly. “Isn’t it better to die here, than somewhere in the endless void of space. And even if you live, how can you live with your own conscience?”

  Brock smiled, wearily. “I have been over all these arguments before, Jeff, threshing them out in my own soul. But the spaceship may be the salvation of homo sapiens as we
ll as of Magnanthropus. Mind power will drive that ship—the power of the united Mag minds within the matrix of the hull. Applying the drive will set up a strain in the thought-matrix of the Universe—and may totter the Elorasponian system back into its own space. I say it may, because I can not be sure that it will. When the Mighty fled Eloraspon long ago, they fled in ships by the thousands. The tremendous, tearing energy of their flight hurled their planet, their sun and its system back into their own normal space. If our one ship will do what the many of the Mighty did long ago, your villagers will live, and a civilization of homo sapiens will build itself on Eloraspon.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  Brock shrugged. “Then we all die—homo sapiens and Magnanthropus. If the shock does not avert the nova, it will hasten it. Even in our spaceship, we can not expect to escape the explosion.”

  “Suppose your scheme works? How about the Mags?” Jarvis was thinking of bodies lying on the plain of Eloraspon, and disembodied minds fleeing forever through space.

  “Time will not exist for us, nor space,” Brock said. “We shall go where we must, wherever that is. I know the orbit of the Mighty on their flight. We shall follow that orbit, with a few slight corrections to compensate for the intervening time. We shall seek the Mighty, and if we find them, learn from them how to return to our physical forms again.”

  Jarvis did not pursue the subject. The respect he had had for Eamus Brock and his little handful of supermen was more profound than ever; for who could say whether or not the Mighty had survived their flight, and, having survived that much, had lasted on through the millennia intervening?