The Black Flame

by Stanley G. Weinbaum

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A BIT OF ANCIENT HISTORY

  THE GIRL'S WORDS snapped him out of his reverie, with the confused knowledge that he was staring at her inanely as she stood there, swaying slightly, like a slender reed, while the gentle breeze whipped her white, gauzy draperies.

  "Come," she said peremptorily. "Come sit beside me here. I have come to the forest to find adventure that I cannot find elsewhere in a boring world. I have not found it. Come, you shall amuse me.

  Sit here and tell me this story I have been hearing about yoursleep."

  Halfhypnotically, Connor obeyed. Nor did he question why. It was all in a line with the rest, that he should find himself here above the sparkling dark pool, beside this womanor girl, rather, since she could be no more than eighteenwhose beauty was starkly incredible.

  The sun, filtering through the leaves, touched her mass of hair, so black that it glinted blue as it fell in waving cascades below her slender waist. Her skin, magnoliatinted, was all the clearer because of the startling ebony of her hair. Her beauty was more than a lack of flaws; it was, in true fact, goddesslike.

  But sultry, flaming. Her perfect lips seemed constantly smiling, but like the smile in her emerald eyes, it was sardonic, mocking.

  For one moment the beauty of this wood sprite, come upon so unexpectedly, swept all other thoughts from Connor's mind; even memory of Evanie. But the next moment Evanie was back, filling his thoughts as she had from the first with her cool, understandable, copperyhaired loveliness. But even in that moment he knew that the radiant creature beside him, so different from Evanie and other Weed girls he had seen, would forever haunt him. Whoever, whatever she might behuman being or wood goddess.

  The girl grew impatient at his silence.

  "Tell me!" she said imperiously. "I have said to you, I would be amused. Tell meSleeper."

  "I am no Sleeperof the type of which you probably have customarily heard," Connor said, obedient to her command. "Whatever has come to me has been none of my doing; nor by my wishes. It was like this"

  Briefly he recited his experience, all that he knew of it, making no dramatic effort. He must have been impressive, for as he talked, he could see the incredulity and mockery pass from her seagreen eyes, to be replaced by reluctant belief, then astonishment.

  "It is almost unbelievable," she said softly, when he had finished. "But I do believe you." Her marvelous eyes held a faraway expression. "If in your memory you have retained knowledge of your own ancient times, great things await you in this age to which you have come."

  "But I know nothing about this age!" Connor quickly complained. "I glean snatches of this and that, of some mysterious Immortals who seem to reign supreme, of many things alien to me and my understanding. But so far, I have not been able to learn much about this age. No! Nor do I even know anything of the history of the ages that have passed while I wassleeping!"

  Connor's wood sprite looked hard at him a moment, admiration for him plain in her lowlidded glance. The mockery flickered a moment in her eyes; then died.

  "Shall I tell you?" she asked. "We of the woods and valleys know many things. We learn as the cycles of years go by. But not always do we pass our knowledge along."

  "Please!" begged Connor. "Please tell meeverything. I am lost!"

  She seemed a little uncertain where to begin, then suddenly started to talk as if giving an allinclusive lesson in history from the beginning of time.

  "You of the ancient world had great cities," she said. "Today there are mighty cities, too. N'York had eight millions of people; Urbs, the great metropolis of this age, has thirty millions. But where there is now one metropolis, your world had a hundred. A marvelous age, that time of yours, but it ended. Some time in your Twentieth Century, it went out in a blaze of war."

  "The Twentieth Century!" exclaimed Connor. "So near my time!"

  "Yes. Your fierce, warlike nations sated their lust for battle at last in one gigantic war that spread like a cloud around the planet. They fought by sea, by land, by air, and beneath sea and land. They fought with weapons whose secrets are still lost, with strange chemistries, with diseases. Every nation was caught in the struggle; all their Vast knowledge went into it, and city after giant city was destroyed by atomic bombs or annihilated by infected water supplies. Famine stalked the world, and after it swept swift pestilence.

  "But, by the fiftieth year after the war, the world had reached a sort of stability. Then came barbarism. The old nations had fallen, and in their place came numberless little citystates, little farming communities each sufficient to itself, weaving its own cloth, raising its own food. And then the language began to change."

  "Why?" asked Connor. "Children speak like their parents."

  "Not eractly," said the wood sprite, with a slow smile. "Language evolves by laws. Here's one:

  Consonants tend to move forward in the mouth as languages age. Take the word 'mother.' In the ancient Tokhar, it was makar. Then the Latin, mater. Then madre, then mother and now our modern word muwer. Do you see? KTDThVeach sound a little advanced in the throat. The ultimate of course, is mamapure labial sounds, which proves only that it's the oldest word in the world."

  "I see," said Connor.

  "Well, once it was released from the bonds of printing, language changed. It became difficult to read the old books, and then books began to vanish. Fire gutted the abandoned cities; the robber bands that lurked there burned books by winter for warmth. Worms and decay ruined them. Precious knowledge vanished, some of it forever."

  She paused a moment, watching Connor keenly. "Do you see now," she asked, "why I said greatness awaits you if you retain any of your ancient knowledge?"

  "Possibly," said Connor. "But go on, please."

  "Other factors, too, were at work," she said, nodding. "In the first place, a group of small citystates seems to be the best environment for genius. That was the situation in Greece during the Golden Age, in Italy during the Renaissance, and all over the world before the Second Enlightenment.

  "Then too, a period of barbarism seems to act as a time of rest for humanity before a charge to new heights. The Stone Age flared suddenly into the light of Egypt, Persia decayed and Greece flowered, and the Middle Ages awoke to the glory of the Renaissance. So the Dark Centuries began to flame into the brilliant age of the Second Enlightenment, the fourth great dawn in human history.

  "It began quietly enough, about two centuries after the war. A young man named John Holland drifted into the village of N'Orleans that sprawled beside the ancient city's ruins. He found the remnants of a library, andunusual in his dayhe could read. He studied alone at first, but soon others joined him, and the Academy came into being.

  "The townspeople thought the students wizards and sorcerers, but as knowledge grew the words wizard and sorcerer became synonyms for what your age called scientists."

  "I see!" muttered Connor, and he was thinking of Evanie the Sorceress. "I see!"

  "N'Orleans," said his charming enlightener, "became the center of the Enlightenment. Holland died, but the Academy lived, and one day a young student named Teran had a vision. Some of the ancient knowledge had by now yielded its secrets, and Teran's vision was to restore the ancient N'Orleans power plants and water systemsto give the city its utilities!

  "Although there was no apparent source of fuel, he and his group labored diligently on the centuriesold machines, confident that power would be at hand when they needed it.

  "And it was. A man named Einar Olin, had wandered over the continent seekingand findingthe last and greatest achievement of the Ancients; he rediscovered atomic energy. N'Orleans wakened anew to its ancient life. Across plains and mountains came hundreds just to see the Great City, and among these were three on whom history turned.

  "These were sandyhaired Martin Sair, and blackhaired Joaquin Smith, and his sister. Some have called her Satanically beautiful. The Black Flame, they call her nowhave you. heard?"

  Connor shook his head, his eyes drinkin
g in the beauty of this woman of the woods, who fascinated him in a manner he would never have believed possible.

  For a moment the mocking glint came back in the girl's eyes, then instantly it was gone as she shrugged her white shoulders and went on.

  "Those three changed the whole course of history. Martin Sair turned to biology and medicine when he joined the halfmonastic Academy, and his genius made the first new discovery to add to the knowledge of the Ancients. Studying evolution, experimenting with hard radiations, he found sterility thenimmortality!

  "Joaquin Smith found his field in the neglected social sciences, government, economics, psychology.

  He too had a dreamof rebuilding the old world. He wasor isa colossal genius. He took Martin Sair's immortality and traded it for power. He traded immortality to Jorgensen for a rocket that flew on the atomic blast, to Kohlmar for a weapon, to Erden for the Erden resonator that explodes gunpowder miles away. And then he gathered his army and marched."

  "War again!" Connor said tightly. "I should have thought they would have had enough."

  But the girl did not heed him. In her emerald eyes was a light as if she were seeing visions herselfvisions of glorious conquest.

  "N'Orleans," she said, "directly in the light of Joaquin Smith's magnetic personality, yielded gladly.

  Other cities yielded almost as if fascinated, while those who fought were overcome. What chance had rifle and arrow against the flying Triangles of Jorgensen, or Kohlmar's ionic beams? And Joaquin Smith himself waswell, magnificent. Even the wives of the slain cheered him when he comforted them in that noble manner of his.

  "America was conquered within sixty years. Immortality gave Smith, the Master, power, and no one save Martin Sair and those he taught has ever been able to learn its secret. Thousands have tried, many have claimed success, but the results of their failures still haunt the world.

  "Andwell, Joaquin Smith has his World Empire now; not America alone. He has bred out criminals and the feebleminded, he has impressed his native English on every tongue, he has built Urbs, the vast, glittering, brilliant, wicked world capital, and there he rules with his sister, Margaret of Urbs,, beside him. Yet"

  "I should think this world he conquered would worship him!" exclaimed Connor.

  "Worship him!" cried the girl. "Too many hate him, in spite of all he has done, not only for this age, but for ages gonesince the Enlightenment. He"

  But Tom Connor was no longer listening. All his thoughts, his attention, his eyes that drank in her beauty, were on the girl. So lovelyand to have so much wisdom stored up in the brain beneath the sheen of that satinyblack cap that was her hair. There could only be one answer to that. She must be a goddess, come to life.

  He ached to touch her, to touch only the hem of her gauzy garment, but that must not be. His heart pounded at the very nearness of herbut it was with a worship that could have thrown him prostrate at her feet.

  "It's all like a dream, what you've told me," he said, his voice faraway, musing. "You're a dream."

  The dancing light of mockery came back into her seagreen eyes.

  "Shall we leave it a dreamthis meeting of ours?" she asked softly. She laid one white hand lightly on his arm and he thrilled at the touch as though an electric current had shot through himbut not a painful annihilating one now. "Man of the Ancients," she said, "will you give me a promise?"

  "Anythinganything!" Connor said eagerly.

  "Then promise me you will say nothing, not even to the Weed girl who is called Evanie the Sorceress, about having seen me this morning. No slightest hint."

  For a moment Connor hesitated. Would it be disloyalty to Evanie, in any way, to make that promise? He did not know. What he did know was that it fell in with his own ideas to keep this meeting a secretlike something sacred; something to hold as a memory deep within his own heart only.

  "Promise?" she repeated, in that silverybell voice.

  Connor nodded. "I promise," he said soberly. "But tell me, will I see you again? Will you"

  Suddenly the girl leaped lightly to her feet, startled, as she stood listening, like the faun she appeared to be. Her astonishing emerald eyes were wide, as she poised for flight. Dimly, the entranced Connor became aware of voices back in the woods. Men were probably coming to seek him, knowing how sick he had been.

  "I must go!" the girl whispered quickly. "But Man of the Ancients, we shall meet again! That is my promise. Keep yours!"

  And then, before he could speak, she had whirled like a butterfly in flight, and was speeding through the woods on noiseless feet. Connor caught one last glimpse of her fluttering white draperies against the brown and green of tree trunks and leaves, then she was, gone.

  He passed a hand slowly before his bewildered eyes. A dream! But she had promised they would meet again. When?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE VILLAGE

  DAYS SLIPPED IMPERCEPTIBLY by. Connor had almost regained his full strength. Time and again, whenever he could do so unobserved, he slipped away to the woods alone, but never again did he catch sight of the wood nymph who had so deeply fascinated him. Gradually he came to persuade himself that the whole incident had been a dream. Many things as strange had happened to him since his awakening. Only one thing gave it the semblance of realitythe knowledge he had gleaned from the inkyhaired girl of mystery, a knowledge later confirmed when he began to enter the peaceful life of the village.

  Aside from Evanie, however, he had but one other close friend. He had taken at once to Jan Orm, engineer and operator of the village of Ormon's single factory on the hill.

  The factory was a perpetual surprise to Connor. The incredibly versatile machines made nearly everything except the heavier mechanisms used in the fields, and these, he learned, could have been made. That was not necessary since the completed machines could as easily be transported as the steel necessary to construct them.

  The atomic power amazed Tom Connor. The motors burned only water, or rather the hydrogen in it, and the energy was the product of synthesis rather than disintegration. Four hydrogen atoms, with their weight of 1.008, combined into one helium atom, with a weight of 4; somewhere had disappeared the difference of .032, and this was the source of that abundant energymatter being destroyed, weight transformed to energy.

  There was a whole series of atomic furnaces, too. The release of energy was a process of one degree, like radium; once started, neither temperature nor pressure could speed or slow it in the least.

  But the hydrogen burned steadily into helium at the uniform rate of half its mass in three hundred days.

  Jan Orm was proud of the plant.

  "Neat, isn't it?" he asked Connor. "One of the type called Omnifac; makes anything. There's thousands of 'em about the country; practically make each town independent, selfsustaining. We don't need your ancient cumbersome railroad system to transport coal and ore."

  "How about the metal you use?"

  "Nor metal either," Jan said. "Just as there was a stone age, a bronze age, and an iron age, just as history calls your time the age of steel, we're in the aluminum age. And aluminum's everywhere; it's the base of all clays, almost eight per, cent of the Earth's crust."

  "I know it's there," grunted Connor. "It used to cost too much to get it out of clay."

  "Well, power costs nothing now. Water's free." His face darkened moodily. "If we could only control the rate, but power comes out at always the same ratea half period of three hundred days. If we could build rocketslike the Triangles of Urbs. The natural rate is just too slow to lift its own weight; the power from a pound of water comes out too gradually to raise a onepound mass. The Urbans know how to increase the rate, to make the water deliver half its energy in a hundred daysten days."

  "And if you could build rockets?"

  "Then," said Jan, growing even moodier, "then we'd" He paused abruptly. "We can detonate it," he said in a changed voice. "We can get all the energy in) one terrific blast, but that's useless for a rocket."

  "Why
can't you use a firing chamber and explode say a gram of water at a time?" Connor asked. "A rapid series of little explosions should be just as effective as a continuous blast."

  "My father tried that," Jan Orm said grimly. "He's buried at the bend of the river."

  Later, Connor asked Evanie why Jan was so anxious to develop atompowered rockets. The girl turned suddenly serious eyes on him, but made no direct reply.

  "The Immortals guard the secret of the Triangle," was all she said. "It's a military secret."

  "But what could he do with a rocket?"

  She shook her glistening hair.

  "Nothing, perhaps."

  "Evanie," he said soberly, "I don't like to feel that you won't trust me. I know from what you've said that you're somehow opposed to the government. Well, I'll help you, if I canbut I can't if you keep me in ignorance."

  The girl was silent.

  "And another thing," he proceeded. "This immortality process. I've heard somebody say that the results of its failures when some tried it, still haunt the world? Why, Evanie?"

  Swiftly a crimson flush spread over the girl's cheeks and throat.

  "Now what the devil have I said?" he cried. "Evanie, I swear I wouldn't hurt you, for the world!"

  "Don't," she only murmured, turning silently away.

  He, too, was hurt, because she was. He knew he owed his life to her for her treatments and hospitality. It disturbed him to think he knew of no way in which to repay her. But he was dubious of his ability to earn much as an engineer in thisi world of strange devices.

  "I'd have to start right at the bottom," he observed ruefully to Evanie when he spoke of that later.

  "In Urbs," Evanie said, "you'd be worth your weight in radium as a source of ancient knowledge. So much has been lost; so much is gone, perhaps forever. Often we have only the record of a great man's name, and no trace of his work. Of these is a man named Einstein and another named de Sittermen acknowledged to be supreme geniuses of science even by the supreme scientists of your age. Their work is lost."

  "I'm afraid it will remain lost, then," he said whimsically. "Both Einstein and de Sitter were contemporaries of mine, but I wasn't up to understanding their theories. All I know is that they dealt with space and time, and a supposed curvature of spaceRelativity, the theory was called."