“What do you want of me?” asked the Earthman warily.
“This is our land,” returned the other. “I should rather ask you why you have come here.”
“To free the princess Ilil!”
“That is your secondary purpose. You have proved yourself more human than a Son of the Mighty, Jeff Jarvis. When our efforts to take you failed, we knew the woman would be bait to bring you here. We have waited a long time for you, for we know your purpose in coming here—a purpose we could not afford to let you forget.”
“I came out of respect for Eamus Brock, seeking the records of the ancients in the archives of Surandanish.”
“Eamus Brock promised us he would send you,” said the Dingir. “The records are tertiary. You have a primary purpose you have not voiced.”
“If there is a purpose other than those I have named,” Jarvis returned, “I do not know of it.”
“Eamus Brock sent you to help us return order to the world of Eloraspon.”
Here it was again, differently phrased, but no less confused in meaning. The Dingir approached slowly.
“We are meant to be friends, Jeff Jarvis. I am Ptal. The Somam, as we call ourselves, call me their leader.”
“Friends?” said Jarvis. “After this?” He indicated the fragments on the floor.
“They will be gathered up and restored to usefulness,” shrugged Ptal. “You still have not guessed, have you? Come—unhand your weapon. You are in no danger here. You wished to consult the records of the Mighty? You shall do so. You wish to see again your princess of Gipar? She is waiting for you, unharmed.”
“I wish not only to see her but to take her away and restore her to her father’s house!”
“You shall…after you have agreed to perform…and have performed… the task we shall ask of you!”
From openings all around the floor of that mighty shaft, scores of Bronze Men stepped forth. Further resistance was useless. Jarvis looked at Thork and made a gesture with uplifted palms.
“We may as well go with him.”
Ptal smiled again that saturnine expression. “The Tharn is a victim of conditioning,” he said briskly, “but you should be ashamed of yourself, Jeff Jarvis! You are a Son of the Mighty, equipped with powers beyond reasoning.” He gave the Earth-man a sly look askance. “Perhaps that has been your trouble? You relied too much upon your powers and not enough upon reason! It should serve as a lesson to you. The Mighty were aware that honest reason transcended even their magnificent powers!”
They went in Ptal’s company directly from Thanranarova to Surandanish, in a bullet-shaped car that hurtled at blinding speed through a tunnel buried a mile deep in the crust of the planet. This subterranean transportation system connected all the cities of the ancients that still existed upon the face of Eloraspon, Ptal told him, and this answered for Jarvis the question of how the Dingir came and went at will without being seen.
Ptal chatted continuously, filling in the gaps in Jarvis’ knowledge of Eloraspon. Eamus Brock had not been able to help the Somam with their problem. His great mind had been too preoccupied with the imminence of the impending nova and the problem of averting it.
“You think of us as men,” Ptal said, “but this is not so. The Somam are not men in the sense of a race. A race has mothers and fathers. The Somam have none. The Mighty created us to serve them. We served them well. After they left our planet forever, we have continued to serve them by watching over as well as we have been able the seed they left behind. We are immortal in the sense that we cannot die, for we were never born.”
“Machines!” said Jarvis. “I might have guessed it from the mechanical way your warriors fought in the shaft of Thanranarova.”
“Partly true,” agreed Ptal, “but there is one other factor. When the Mighty created us, they built into our beings a non-revocable inhibition. No Somam can harm in any way one of the Mighty.”
“Yet you have brought harm to the princess Ilil, who is a Child of the Mighty!”
“Not harm, Jeff Jarvis.” A look of sadness spread over the Bronze Man’s glistening features. “What we have done, we have done for her own good.” He flashed the Earthman an honest glance. “You have been told of our choosing of the newborn. That is good. And you must have guessed that we chase only Children of the Mighty—those mutants who may one day again develop the race of the Mighty.”
“What do you do with them?”
“We…segregate them.” The hesitation in Ptal’s tone was for only an instant, but Jarvis’ quick ear detected it and he wondered. In answer to a further question, Ptal replied, “The Lulu are descendants of the race of the Mighty—so are the elementals—the Eeima, the Eltaroa and the rest.”
In spite of Jarvis’ pointed questions on the subject, Ptal eluded him in the conversation and continued pleasantly on other subjects. In the city of Surandanish, they rose up the shaft together to the place of the archives of the Mighty.
“Here,” said Ptal, “lie the answers to your questions.” He gestured toward shelves extending from ceiling to floor, filled with cylindrical objects of metal. “Every floor, every room in this building is filled with these cylinders. They represent the massed knowledge of the race of the Mighty. You are welcome to consult them at will, even as Eamus Brock did. Over here is where he worked… I will leave you now. Later, I will bring the princess Ilil to you.”
After Ptal departed, Thork grumbled, “Beware, Jeff Jarvis, the man who asks you to work for him but tells you not what the job is! That fellow has a way about him I do not like. He can’t be trusted.”
“Conditioning,” laughed Jarvis. “You were taught from childhood to fear and hate the Dingir. You can’t help feeling wary. You do not understand what they were doing in taking away some of your children.”
“And I suppose you do?” sulked the Tharn.
“I assume that I do. I wondered why they did not attack me with violence. That question is answered. Because they can not. Neither can they harm any of the Children they took. Some day, Thork, you may understand.”
“Be that as it may,” the giant replied, “they have not hesitated to kill the Lulu when the occasion required it. I would see more of their good intentions before I passed judgment, if I were you.”
Jarvis dismissed the Tharn’s qualms, taken with the wonder of his surroundings. This was where Eamus Brock had worked and studied half a lifetime to defeat the forces of Nature! Here lay the wisdom, the know-how, which could make a new world of Eloraspon, a planet of civilization and scientific advancement. The key to the future lay in his hand!
There was a table there, and a bench. Upon the table lay a single cylinder. Jarvis knew how to get information from that inanimate metal. Eamus Brock had told him. He picked up the cylinder and held it in his palms, bending his faculties, piercing it with his Mag senses. The first words to impinge upon his brain startled him.
“My dear Jarvis!” The words, the intonation—it was the very voice of Eamus Brock! Jarvis shook his head and concentrated again.
“My dear Jarvis!” the cylinder resumed. “What a paradox this is that I speak to you whom I have never met while you listen, remembering what we already have been to each other! When you were a child, I picked your mind from a multitude and conditioned it for what lies ahead of you now—at this moment when you have picked up this record of my thoughts and begun to scan it.
“I am but one man and can do but one thing, and that thing is to avert the threatened nova. I can do that and Earth will live. You will some day return there. Does that come as a shock to you? Let me explain…”
Brock’s thoughts went on and on. Words, pictures, experiences, hurtled through Jarvis’ mind, numbing him, saddening him. In brief scope, Brock condensed all that he had learned about the Mighty from this tremendous library.
“To save a world is
one thing,” Brock concluded tiredly. “To assume the power of Deity and affect its destiny is another. I am glad I do not have to make the choice confronting you. And yet, I know that however you do choose, it will be the right choice. It is up to you alone to judge the Mighty. God help you, Jeff Jarvis!”
The cylinder became inert in Jarvis’ hands, but his mind still raced with thought. All his questions were answered. His future lay spread out starkly before him. Brock had said the choice was his, but he knew there was no choice. He must destroy the Soman for the greater good of Eloraspon, and he grasped within his mind the key to performing that deed.
Thork said, “You have the look of a dead man!”
“Dead?” Jarvis shook himself. “If it were only that!”
If only it were death! Destruction of the Somam would cost him more than life. It would cost him a dream—not in his lifetime would the Mighty walk again on the face of Eloraspon!
Thork grunted and doubled in pain. A spasmed expression twisted his tusked features, fie straightened and smiled with an effort.
“You speak lightly of what is my prerogative, Jeff Jarvis!”
Jarvis stood, anxiety stabbing him. “Why do you say that, old friend?”
“Death has found his opportunity to be my host,” Thork grimaced. “My belly churns with the tharn-sickness. I used the last of the drug yesterday!”
Jarvis began to laugh. Wild, ringing shouts pealed from his lips. He hurled the cylinder across the room. It bounded with a clanging noise from shelf-tier to shelf-tier, clattering to a stop against the wall. Thork looked bitter.
“Does it amuse you that death comes for me?”
Jarvis gripped the giant and hugged him with remorse.
“Could I make you live a thousand years, I would! Could I prevent what I must do, I would do that also! Each of us is lost, my Thork, each of us in his own, peculiar way…”
Thork looked puzzled. Jarvis gestured toward the cylinder.
Thork doubled again as cramps racked his giant frame and the agony wrung grunts from between his tusks. “Oh, this is ecstasy!” he groaned.
Jarvis made the giant lie upon the floor, loosened his trappings for comfort, and wiped away the sweat that dewed the broad, blue brow. There was an agony within him to match the suffering of the Tharn.
“He dies the tharn-death,” said a voice dispassionately behind Jarvis.
There was a cry at the same time and the flutter of feminine garments. Ilil knelt opposite him and held Thork’s hand, her eyes brimming with tears. Jarvis looked around at Ptal.
“Can you do nothing for him?”
“The Tharn are victims of their own foolishness. They cannot be helped.”
“Is that why you have permitted them, of all the peoples of Eloraspon, to dwell in the cities of the Mighty?”
“The Tharn are the only race incapable of spawning a Child of the Mighty. Their use of the drug inhibits the mutation.”
Jarvis looked again at Thork through tears blurring his sight.
“Take Ilil and go!” husked the Tharn. “Be gone from this evil place!”
Ptal gestured the Earthman aside. Jarvis looked pleadingly to Ilil and she nodded. Her delicate hand stroked the brow of the dying Tharn.
“I must ask you now the same thing we asked of Eamus Brock,” Ptal began.
“You want the formula for creating the Somam,” Jarvis said. “Eamus Brock recorded a cylinder and left it for me. He has told me everything. There is no such formula. The Mighty destroyed it before leaving Eloraspon. The Somam are deathless—their numbers could be made to increase until this world—and other worlds, too—would be overrun with them.”
The Bronze Man smiled bitterly. “Once we yearned for that, Jeff Jarvis. Now we would be content to increase our number by one!”
“Why just one?”
“We need no more,” said the Bronze Man enigmatically. “Him we would create free of the inhibitions with which the Mighty endowed the rest of us!”
What was Ptal trying to keep from saying? What was it he did not want Jarvis to know? Was it what he already knew—what Eamus Brock’s cylinder had already told him? Suspicion flared in his brain. The Somam did not want the Mighty ever again to return to Eloraspon. One Somam with the ability to kill each mutant as it was born would insure that.
CHAPTER XIII
“That woman there whose beauty enchants you,” Ptal said bitterly. “Would you rather see her die now—or change slowly into a hideous monster? That is what will happen to her, Jeff Jarvis, for it has happened to every Child of the Mighty born upon Eloraspon.”
Jarvis was stunned. Eamus Brock had said nothing of this in the cylinder.
He said, “I cannot believe that!”
Ptal shrugged. “I did not expect you to. It is a thing that must be seen to be believed.”
“And I…?”
Ptal nodded. “But not so quickly, perhaps. You spent most of your years upon Earth, away from the influence of the Song of Power, which causes the change.” He said, “Unhappy human beings! We have tried to save them without success. Our effort to transplant the race to Earth failed in its purpose…”
“The Sumerians!” Jarvis exclaimed.
Ptal nodded. “They were soon absorbed by the races of Earth,” he said.
“You might have tried them out elsewhere,” Jarvis said.
The Bronze Man made a negative movement of his head. “Where do you think the mutant spark in your own being came from? What we tried to stamp out here, we succeeded only in spreading to Earth! You and others like you are the result of that infection.”
Jarvis was finding it hard to keep up. “Are you trying to say the Mighty did not breed true to species?”
“One child in many was born with the powers of Magnanthropus,” said Ptal. “The rest reverted to the human. The Mighty made themselves immortal with development of the Somam body, to which they transferred the power of their own intellects.”
“This I know about,” Jarvis put in. “They developed the Song of Power—a vast outpouring of energy that resulted from harnessing the heat and magnetism of the planet’s core.”
“You could not be a Son of the Mighty and not be aware of it,” the Bronze Man returned. “The broadcast wave is received in the very walls of the buildings in every city throughout Eloraspon and rebroadcast on a heterodyned wavelength. In the days of the Mighty, power was thus furnished not only to maintain the Mighty themselves but also their machines and appliances.
“The Mighty inhabited not only this world but also Nanna, its satellite, and they built Munus for a world of rest and pleasure and set it to circling about Nanna. It is to Munus that we send the Children of the Mighty, where they go through their change and die.”
“No,” said Jarvis. His cheeks had the pallor of death. “That is the second time you have said that and I refuse to believe it!”
“The Mighty themselves knew it. It was their main reason for developing the Somam body. Immortality became a secondary benefit.”
“Why don’t you try to rediscover the formula of creation?” Jarvis asked.
“The Somam can neither create nor discover. We cannot even read the records the Mighty left for future generations of mutants. Our thoughts and acts were programmed before our creation. Like the computer that can solve a problem but cannot create one, we function within limits too narrow to help ourselves.”
“I am no scientist to rediscover the secret for you,” Jarvis protested. “So what happens now?”
“You and the woman must be taken to Munus to await the change…and death. There is not room on Eloraspon for more like the Sea People, the Eeima, the Eltaroa and the myriad others you have never met!”
Jarvis breathed hard, turning away from the implacable look of the Bronze Man. Ilil tu
rn into a monster? Himself? No! He was no character in a fairytale but a living, breathing creature of flesh and blood, gifted with mental powers transcending the human! And he possessed, thanks to Eamus Brock’s recording, the secret of the Somam’s destruction.
There was a dull, chopping sound behind him and the voice of Thork, muffled with pain, gritted slowly.
“By my blade, this thing has died again, Jeff Jarvis! Take the maid and flee this accursed place!”
“I have made up my mind,” Jarvis said, looking down on the motionless hulk of the Bronze Man.
“The others will come to seek this one,” Thork said. “I can hold them here long enough for you to reach safety at the camp of the Lugal Elman.”
“Is my father here?” gasped Ilil.
“He cannot be far away,” Jarvis said. “He left Gipar when we did.”
“So go!” cried the Tharn, shaking his tusked head vehemently.
Jarvis grasped the princess’ hand. “Come!” he said. Thork leaned on his blade, watching them depart. Already in the throes of death, he was anxious to give what few hours of life remained to assure their escape.
As they sped from room to room in the great tower of archives, Jarvis said, “We dare not go to your father. The Somam would kill him and all his warriors to get us back. Did they tell you of our fate?”
She nodded, her eyes large and dark with terror. “I am sick with the knowledge. But wherever you go, my love, there will I follow.”
“They would destroy us as they have destroyed all our kind,” Jarvis returned. “It is in my power to destroy them, and that is what I must do.”
In the bowels of Surandanish was the Place of Power—the room from which the Mighty had controlled that great power source at the heart of their planet. Its location and a dozen ways to reach it were engraved upon his mind from the recording Eamus Brock had left for him. There was a single switch there, which, when opened, would shut off forever the Song of Power. The power source would be totally destroyed, the lights would go out in the cities of Eloraspon and they would sing no more to the Mag consciousness. More than this would happen, too, but he had no more time to consider. He lifted his hawk-like visage in an attitude of listening. A Bronze Man stepped through the far wall.
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 77
