“A force shield!” Jarvis exclaimed. “Eamus has insulated the Mag environment with a force shield. I heard talk of it in the city.”
Stones, hurled at the barrier, flashed in spicules of flame, shattering with miniature thunder. A few firearms crackled, and the bullets exploded on contact with the invisible screen.
“Whoever touches that screen is a dead man,” Jarvis said.
His ranging glance caught sight of Saylo and Harper at the barrier. Both were shouting simultaneously, gesturing toward the hurrying Mags. Jarvis charged them as it seemed the crowd was on the verge of surging into the shield. He struck out and Saylo spun half around and went to his knees. Mitch charged past him and struck Harper low, his shoulder into the pit of the red-faced man’s stomach.
“Stop!” Jarvis screamed. “Anybody who passes the edge of the launching pad will die! You can do nothing to stop them! Go back to your homes!”
A growl and a roar from the mob followed his words.
“Can you contact Eamus Brock?” Mitch put in excitedly.
“I am with you, Jeff.” Brock’s voice sounded in Jarvis’ mind. “We need a few more minutes still. The mob can not reach us, but many will die if they rush that screen. I am sending Toby out to you—he will stay behind with you. That may confuse them just enough to give us the time we need.”
A glowing cocoon raised from those around the spaceship base, hurtled through the invisible barrier and hovered over the crowd. Toby’s voice rang out, clear and strong.
“Do you believe the Mags are deserting you? I am a Mag, and I choose to stay with you!”
The cocoon settled and Toby materialized at Jarvis’ side. Jo grasped him.
“No, Toby! Go back! They are your people! You must go with them where they go!~”
“Jeff needs me here as much as Eamus ever could,” he said gently. “You and he—you are my people. And Brock wants it this way.”
Another cocoon lifted from the crowd of Mags and hurtled swiftly toward them. Daniels grasped Jarvis’ arm, palmed Mitch’s shoulder in a huge hand.
“I’m staying, too!” he shouted at the crowd, and his voice rolled like thunder on the dust-filled air. “I’ve got faith—and that’s what you folks need—faith! Eamus Brock is going to save you once again, like before—and I’m staying here with you to prove it!”
During this interval, the crowd had milled confusedly, staying clear of the edge of the pad. Saylo and Harper had helped each other to their feet. For a moment, eternity stood still, then there was a cry from the crowd—a cry that made the hair prickle at the nape of Jarvis’ neck.
“The sun! The sun!”
He looked up into the sky, peering through the crack between two fingers to protect his eyes from searing rays of ultraviolet. His sight filled with scalding tears. The sun, like a glowing cave-mouth in the sky, had swollen enormously. It blazed more fiercely than it ever had, and the intensity of light and heat emitted from its billowing surface was almost more than flesh could bear. And it was no longer a disc. The incandescent surface glowed waveringly, as if seen through a roiled fluid, and from its limb giant flames licked out, millions of miles into space.
The sun was erupting—the nova had begun!
Jarvis felt the sunlight beating on his upturned face in a raw downpour of scorching radiation. The plain was drenched in shimmering brilliance. The temperature of the air was mounting swiftly to unbearable intensity.
How long would it take for the first tendrils of furiously flaming gases to span the gulf from sun to Eloraspon? How many minutes had they to live—if Brock and the race of Magnanthropi failed?
In minutes only, Jarvis knew, the increasing ferocity of radiation would set plains and mountains afire long before the planet was engulfed in flames. The oceans would boil in their beds, and the surface rocks would melt into bubbling slag. There would be no living thing left to see that phase of destruction…
Jarvis felt possessed with a calm, such as comes with the knowledge of inevitability. The time was now. They would die or they would not die, and they were powerless to direct destiny to either hand. Their only hope lay in Eamus Brock.
What point could panic serve now? Panic is an urge to flee to safety. What use is it when there is no safety, nowhere to flee? The crowd stood mute, irresolute, shielding their upturned faces with their hands.
Jarvis’ glance ranged the field where, a moment ago, the cocoons of the Mags had flitted. There was no movement there now. Lifeless bodies lay sprawled on the ground—the spaceship was manned!
The scene grew hotter, the daylight brighter. What was Brock waiting for? There had been hurry and desperation in the last few minutes—had the ship been boarded in time?
It seemed to Jarvis, watching with scorching eyes, that the spiring needle of the spaceship quivered. Jo clung to him, her body pressed against his.
He stood with legs braced, shoulders thrown back, his craggy face tense and sorrowful, his eyes fixed on Mankind’s final challenge to the threat of destruction. Would that ship never move?
The ship began to glow. Colors flowed in phosphorescent streams from stem to base, brighter and brighter, until their lashing brilliance outshone the exploding sun. A mighty humming vibrated on the air. In the depths of his soul, in spite of everything he could do to shut out the torture of it, Jarvis felt the screaming as the very matrix of space writhed under the lash of force unleashed by the united Mag minds.
Perspiration trickled down Jarvis’ lean cheeks and dripped from his jawline. The air smelled hot, and it seemed to him he could hear from afar the roar of floods in the mountains as snow-fields and glaciers melted and ran in the heat.
The spaceship lifted! The humming mounted to a shrill resonance of sound that tormented the eardrums, then whispered into silence. In Jarvis’ inner being, in his very soul, such a tumultuous storm of thought-turned-to-energy ripped and tore that he could not bear it, and cried out, covering his head with his arms. But he could tear his eyes from that magnificent ship. Dust swirled at its base, mounted in a cloud to its sky-reaching tip.
The spaceship shone with a brilliance that was like a flame in the shroud of dust. The needle-tip pressed against the glowing sky, which seemed afire with pallid flame from horizon to horizon. The ship began to glide upward with swiftly increasing acceleration.
The air clove before it with a whistling shriek, and suddenly the ship was gone, vanished in an instant into outer space, the dwindling mote of it lost forever in the glare of the sky. Jarvis mind rocked with the assault of a deluge of force. The air thundered in a continuous, diminishing peal. And the sky was empty of all but light.
Somebody shouted, and the shout was swallowed up in a babble of confusion. The very air turned dark. The sky churned with an opaque barrier of clouds, sprung up from nowhere, driven on the wings of a furious wind, dropping scalding rain as they fled. People tumbled to the ground and rolled helplessly in the grip of the hurricane, their cries lost in the noise of earthquake, in the brittle breaking and smashing of the magnificent towers of the City of Brock.
Before the dark wholly closed them in, Jarvis caught a glimpse of John Daniels, his giant frame still standing when all else had been battered to the ground, his arms lifted skyward in a gesture, at once of beseeching prayer and of triumph.
The breath was dashed from Jarvis’ lungs as he was flung to the ground. He gasped for air, and the howling wind snatched it from his mouth and nostrils. He reached for Jo as he tumbled, trying desperately to find her in the abysmal murk and pandemonium.
The ground heaved, uttering thunderclaps of sound as invisible crevices opened and crashed together again. He crawled on hands and knees, crying Jo’s name.
Lightning flared and a drenching rain sluiced upon the plain. He felt cold drops hammering him, like hammers of ice, cold and getting colder. He heard Jo’s
voice, tiny, lost in the enormity of wind and rain, answering his call. They collided in the dark and the hissing rain and clung to each other.
The jarring of the planet was abruptly stilled. The wind shrieked a note on diminishing force. Pallid light wavered through the gloom.
Jarvis felt light, as if he barely touched the ground. The air was filled with wreathing vapors—cold, cold. He sat up, feeling his bruises. Jo was in his arms and he thanked God she still lived.
The downpour from the heavens was like water dripping from ice, congealing on his flesh. He searched the murky plain with his eyes. Formless lumps stirred here and there as stunned people got to their feet. He looked toward the city. It was a heap of tumbled shards.
The wind dropped to nothing, then began to blow from the opposite direction, keen and cold. He felt the sharp prickling of ice crystals pecking at his heated cheek. He grasped unbelievingly at the flecks swirling before his eyes, looked at them on his palms, melting into water droplets. Snow!
Stunning realization struck him, and he shouted with sheer joy. Scrambling hastily to his feet, he pulled Jo up beside him.
Brock’s plan had not failed! The snow was proof—Eloraspon had been hurled back into its own universe! He shouted as loud as he could.
“Get up! It’s all over! There will be no nova today!”
Jo’s face loomed in front of him, her eyes wide and alight, and she was smiling, her hair in wild disarray and flecked with snow. He seized her in his arms and hugged her delightedly.
“It’s winter!” he cried. “It’s winter and it’s snowing! Eloraspon has returned to its own universe!”
The freezing wind bit at their lightly clad bodies. Jarvis danced, holding Jo as a partner, cutting fantastic capers. He felt as buoyant as if he floated in water. For months, he had been accustomed to the combined gravity pull of Earth and Eloraspon on his body. Now Earth was gone. There was only the gravity of Eloraspon to contend with…and the winter. Yes, it would be hard, this winter; but there would come Spring. And after that, he would find a way to lead his people out of the mountains, to the land of the plateau, where game was plentiful, where the grass grew deep, and where a new civilization might take root.
He fell in with the movement of the crowd toward the village, cuddling Jo against him, and looked up at the sullen sky.
What would Eamus Brock and the Mags discover up there? Or, would they some day return to Eloraspon? He clutched Jo more tightly against him and hurried her toward the village.
SEED OF ELORASPON
Originally published in Fantastic Stories of Imagination, October & November 1964.
Overhead was the blue sky of Eloraspon; all around the tiny sloop heaved the glassy sea of that alien world. Jefferson Jarvis slept most of the time. The craft sailed itself with tiller lashed. When he was awake, Jarvis stared at the horizon, fished, kept shipboard house, and spread the sail to catch occasional rain. The sea of Eloraspon was as salt as those of that Earth he felt he should never see again and undrinkable.
He knew where he was going. He felt the call of that alien place in his inmost being and steered his course directly toward Surandanish, that city of the Mighty of old that was now the beacon of mankind. There lay the answer to what he sought, so Eamus Brock had assured him in those days before Magnanthropus had left this world, preventing a threatened nova-explosion of the sun and saving the remnant of mankind for a future destiny.
That destiny was now in his, Jarvis’, hands. Eamus Brock had assured him this, for in Surandanish lay the heaped-up wealth of intellectual and scientific advancement that had once belonged to the vanished race of the Mighty.
And so Jarvis kept his inner being attuned to the beacon of Surandanish, knowing that so long as he followed that unheard call, he could not miss his goal.
The cloud-piled smudge of a coastline, appearing ahead in morning mists, made his heart leap with excitement. He climbed the rigging for a better view, his lean, sardonic face working, lithe muscles twisting under sun-gilded skin. Was this his goal? Would he find here the ancient city of Surandanish?
Observations of the stars which, on Eloraspon, were almost identical in their constellations to those of Earth, had let him know he sailed tropical waters. The land ahead might be only an island, but he steered directly for it with high hope, until he could make out capes and headlands and enormous trees a thousand feet in height similar to those he had left on that far northern shore, by the ruined city of Dilsaloranu. It must be a continent.
He would have beached his craft within an hour, except for the sudden appearance of another ship. Another ship, on a world he thought uninhabited? It was preposterous—impossible! Yet, there it was, bearing down on him with foam curling at its forefoot, its square, orange sail bellied in the wind, and a full score of oars dipping on either side. Creatures swarmed its deck, but of what form they might be, he could not make out at the distance separating them. That he had been sighted was certain, for the vessel bore straight toward him, and its bows were black with a seething crowd of—what?
Jarvis was undecided whether to steer toward the ship or to turn and flee. So startling and unexpected had been the appearance of the vessel that he was still numb with shock. The strangers made up his mind for him. A large object arced from the foredeck of the galley and hurtled with a thunderous splash into the sea between them. Whoever, or whatever, these Elorasponians were, they certainly were not friendly. By the time their stone-thrower had hurled another boulder into the sea, Jarvis had jibed the sloop into a course before the wind, run up a balloon jib, and was fleeing for his life.
The Earthmen Jarvis had left on the northern continent had built the sloop well, with clean, graceful lines that spoke its potential of high speed and easy maneuverability. Faint howls of rage came to Jarvis’ ears as the distance between pursuer and pursued lengthened and the missiles splashed farther and farther astern. By nightfall, both enemy ship and land were out of sight; Jarvis had the sea to himself.
Feeling safe, Jarvis stowed his sails and threw out a sea anchor. Nearness to land tokened a storm which, by experience, he knew to be a nightly occurrence in the vicinity of a continent.
The moon rose as the sun went down; it was round and full, outshining its tiny, circling companion. Jarvis knew Eloraspon to be Earth’s twin across hyperspace; hence the moons of both worlds were also twins. But the tiny companion of the Elorasponian moon puzzled him; its like was unknown to dwellers of Earth…dead Earth, he thought bitterly, destroyed in that cataclysm of merging worlds which had brought him and mankind’s remnant to Eloraspon. One thing observation had established about the moonlet—it circled its primary twice in the course of a day, and by night could easily be conceived a celestial clock, telling the hours with unsurpassed accuracy.
Jarvis fell asleep contemplating the strangeness of it, only to awaken as the sea began to heave threateningly. Wind moaned in the rigging and hissed from moonlit whitecap to whitecap. Ragged clouds streamed the misty sky, long-streaks of mauve and dirty yellow against the blackness of space, gathered into vast masses that shut out the light; and with darkness came a new liveliness in the storm. The sea leaped; the sloop tossed like a cork. Rain lashed the whining sea. Jarvis tied himself to a thwart and clung to the tiller.
He had never seen so savage a clash of the elements, not even on the coast of the northern continent. The gale shrieked and the waters thundered. He fought the tiller for hours, running before the storm, blinded by lightning and rain, drenched by howling seas. There was a roar beneath the howl, a roar that swelled in intensity and menace before he recognized it for what it was—the crash of breakers upon a storm-lashed shore.
Even had Jarvis realized earlier his proximity to land, he could have done nothing to avoid the rocky fangs that now sprouted all around him from the tossing waters. He felt the stout bottom strike with a grinding, splintering jar that r
attled the bones in his body. Then the sloop labored upward on the crest of a monster wave, heeled over on its beam and struck again. The rending of planks was like the death cry of a living thing. The strumming mast broke off at the deck and pitched into the sea. Jarvis felt his lashings part and his body hurtle through a spume-fraught maelstrom; then his head struck and he knew nothing more.
* * * *
Jarvis regained consciousness in bright morning sunlight, the soft susurration of surf crooning a melody in his ears. He pulled jerkily to his feet on the sandy shingle and looked around with blurred eyes. He was in a deep cove between upreared headlands. Inland towered a giant forest, its topmost branches seeming to brush the smiling sky, its great-girthed trunks rooted firmly in the rocky soil. Nothing moved on this birdless shore save himself and the whispering surf. The sloop lay on its beam end a short distance away, wedged between a pair of jagged rocks.
He inspected it bleakly. The sloop would never float again. And his stores were spoiled by sea water that had entered through the jagged gashes in the hull. But there was something there worth salvaging. His weapons. He dug them out with loving care. The sword he had forged from spring steel he girded at his hip. On the opposite side of his sword-belt he hung a short-handled, double-bitted axe which he had learned by arduous practice to throw accurately and ferociously, and to retrieve by means of the braided rawhide rope tied to its handle. At the nape of his neck, under his leather shirt, he holstered his throwing knife and slipped his hunting boomerang through the waistband of his leather trousers. Long since, the colony of Earthmen on the northern continent had used up their store of ammunition; rifles, pistols and shotguns were useless. Jarvis’ weapons replaced them remarkably well.
He killed a small, six-legged something with his throwing knife and braised its parts with a fire he had sparked from flint and steel. Filled and content, he felt recovered from his ordeal of the night, and set out through the forest in the direction of the imperious, beckoning call that strummed through his consciousness. He was once again on the trail of Surandanish.
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 68
