Forgotten Fiction
Page 35
He tried to think, his forehead drawn into deep furrows, but no thought came. His mind seemed blank; only a dazed wonder was there—though something seemed to be haunting the recesses of his memory.
Slowly a vague recollection pierced his mental fog; his reason clutched at it, as something rational, lucid, staple. That shattering roar in the background somewhere; his brain shot through with prismatic spangles of light; these blending, fading; an agony of deadening pain; then the blackness of utter extinction. But before that—what?
Though he racked his brain for an answer, there was none.
Suddenly he became aware that the cold was striking more formidably. Clad as he was in a thin summer suit, without a hat, the wind tore through to his skin like lashes that froze as they touched. His thighs had grown stiff; his back and shoulders had lost all heat; and he began to feel the drowsiness that he somehow knew heralded the approach of his last sleep. Quickly he arose to stamp his feet and strike his hands together to keep his blood circulating.
As he kept his body in motion, he cast his eyes on every side, attempting, by a study of his surroundings, to start his memory working. The first thing that caught his attention was the sun—and the heavens around it. Like a great red ball it hung in a sky that was tinged with a rosy glow—a sun unlike any he had ever seen. It seemed to radiate less heat, to be smouldering, rather than blazing like the sun to which Donald dimly knew he was accustomed. He could look at the orb without discomfort. Apparently it was cooling down—with age!
He shifted his gaze. Far to the north—or what he thought must be the north, using the red sun as a guide—towered a lofty, ice-clad mountain. To east and west and south stretched the wilderness of ice-hummocks, fantastic mounds of jagged crystal, that continued endlessly until they vanished in a foggy, blue-white haze.
But it was all new, foreign to Don Steele. He knew he had never seen this landscape before; knew that he was accustomed to a different, less forbidding environment—but beyond that his mind was blank. A sense of complete hopelessness swept over him. If only he could remember!
Turning toward the north again, he cut short his steady stamping and clapping, and stared across the ice with quickened interest. His heart leaped with mingled hope and dread, for he thought he had detected a sign of movement behind a hill of ice. A rescuer or a new menace—which?
WITH disconcerting abruptness the newcomer sprang into view—a grotesque little man no more than five feet in height. His great hairless head, fully fifteen inches in diameter, seemed completely out of proportion with the rest of his body; it towered over his frail figure like an exaggerated caricature of a human cranium. His face was a dainty thing, small of feature, also hairless, with wide penetrating black eyes. And his only apparel was a single tight-fitting garment of silvery, metallic cloth like a very fine mesh chain-mail, covering him from head to feet. The latter were shod in sandals of the same substance, with sheets of flexible metal for soles; his huge head was covered by a metallic skull cap. He seemed entirely unaware of the cold.
At sight of Don Steele the little man stopped short, an expression of amazement on his face. An instant he hesitated, then cast a furtive glance over his shoulder—and continued rapidly across the ice.
Don watched his approach with wonder in his eyes. He was blue with cold, but he tried to ignore his discomfort. Suddenly he gasped—the man seemed to be completely surrounded by an almost invisible aura, a faint cloud of light! No sooner had that thought flashed through his mind, than another followed—a thought just as startling. It was as though a voice had whispered close to his ear.
“How’d you get here? . . . You’ll freeze, dressed that way . . . Escaped from the Time Sphere, eh? . . . No; you just came through. . . The Keeper released Kwa, the brute-man—he is after me. . . Run, or we will both die.”
The thoughts came from some extraneous source in short, excited, disconnected sentences—yet he actually heard nothing. Groping for understanding as in a maze, he suddenly realized that he was receiving a telepathic message from the little man.
About to reply, another thought came to him: “Too late; he’s on us! . . . And I have no weapon. . . Curse the Keeper!”
Don followed the other’s gaze, and his own became a fixed stare of incredulity. The approaching figure, the pursuer, was as unlike his quarry as it was possible for a human being to be.
He was tall, a giant, towering almost seven feet above the ice. And he was so broad that Steele, himself a powerful man, seemed puny by comparison. His body was clad in heavy gray furs—what appeared to be the shaggy hides of timber wolves. And on one shoulder rested an amazingly huge stone axe, the head of which was fully a foot in length. A formidable weapon, Don thought.
But the giant’s face—it was the most repulsive countenance he had ever seen. The features of the brute, low-browed, were wicked little eyes, and heavy lips drawn back over yellow fangs in a perpetual, hideous snarl. Nose there was none. Some time in the past, evidently, a beast had torn it away, for a deep, livid scar, teeth-marks projected from both sides of the ugly mass of twisted flesh where the nose had been.
With a sudden roar of rage the brute increased his pace toward the waiting men, swaying from side to side like an intoxicated sailor. Taking his great axe from his shoulder, he began swinging it back and forth in a menacing fashion, guttural growls issuing from his throat.
The thought of the little man came to Don. “We could run farther, but he would overtake us anyway . . . We only die once.”
DON STEELE gritted his teeth, his square jaw thrust forward pugnaciously, an angry glint in his gray eyes. “I’m not planning to die—at least not without a struggle!” he ground out. “Maybe I’ll freeze to death later on—but maybe I won’t!” Here at least was something he could understand. A fight—it could not be affected in the least by his impotent memory.
Coolly his eyes cast about for a weapon. In an instant they paused; then he sprang toward a long splinter of glass that glittered in the sunlight. It was about two feet in length, more than an inch wide at one end tapering gradually to a needle-sharp point. But it was pitifully thin, less than a half inch, a sorry weapon to pit against that great axe. Still, it was better than nothing.
As Don raised this, wrapping his handkerchief around the broad end, he realized that the giant was upon him. Instinctively he fell back—and the heavy mass of stone flashed past, no more than an inch from his face. While he strove to regain his balance the giant leaped forward a second time. Landing, with axe poised for a downward blow, a howl of pain and rage burst from him, and he hopped about on one fur-wrapped foot. Raising the other, his prey taking second place in his brute mind, he dropped his weapon and drew a sharp sliver of glass from the thin, hide sole.
Quick to see his chance, Don sprang upon the giant and plunged his improvised dagger into the broad chest. At the same instant he was caught in a mighty embrace, and two powerful arms sought to crush the life from his body.
Madly he struggled, but his efforts were futile. He could not breathe; his ribs were giving way beneath the terrible pressure; his senses were leaving him—when abruptly he was released! As he staggered back, the brute-man swayed for an instant—then crashed to the ice and lay still. And Don saw a length of bloody, sharp-pointed glass protruding from his back—the dagger that had been forced deeper and deeper by the pressure the giant himself had exerted, until it had killed him.
Drawing the back of his hand across his eyes. Don strove to dissipate the blackness that obscured his vision. His ears were ringing and his breath came in great, labored gasps. But he no longer felt so terribly cold; the exertion had quickened circulation. He knew, however, that in a very few minutes the gale would reassert itself, and the cold would bite still deeper.
“Your’re cold—put on the suit of Kwa. It will warm you until we get back to the Time Sphere where you can discard it.” The thoughts of the little man reached him. “A fine combat; the Keeper will welcome you.”
Don nodde
d. He realized the wisdom of the suggestion. Those heavy furs would keep him warm. Though what was meant by the Keeper he didn’t know. With a quizzical smile at his strange companion he set about removing the foul-smelling, untanned skins from the huge body. In about five minutes the distasteful task was finished and he was dressed in the primitive costume, put on over his clothing.
He turned to his waiting companion, frowning thoughtfully. His mind was again groping for an understanding of his strange surroundings. Other questions plagued his thoughts—wonder at the little man’s apparent warmth, the thin veil of light that surrounded him; his queer means of communication; the peculiarity of a brute and an obvious super-intellectual existing in the same age.
“SAY,” he began, “I want to ask—” The other checked him with a gesture, and his thoughts began pouring into Don’s mind. They were less excited now, less disconnected. “I see that you have much to ask, but the effort is not necessary. . . As we move toward the City of Thought I will tell you all you wish to know. Come.”
Don Steele followed wonderingly. This strange little man with the huge head apparently knew his thoughts before he uttered them. They were moving northward toward the ice-clad mountain, threading their way among the frozen hummocks.
“I am Gorg Merlo,” the thoughts began. “I have a number, but you would not remember it. . . You are Donald Steele. . . You wonder about my defiance of the cold—and the fact that you do wonder marks you as being extremely archaic. Heat was mastered as far back as the year 5000. This radio-active metal, my costume, sets up a vibration about me that retains enough of my bodily heat to maintain a uniform temperature at all times. If you will walk close enough to enter the zone, you will feel it.”
Obediently Don drew near the man who called himself Gorg Merlo, and he felt a gratifying warmth surrounding him.
“You saved my life from that brute, Kwa; in return I shall make you a costume like mine . . . As for my means of communication which seems to puzzle you—I am exercising the normal power of a well-developed mind. I can grasp your thought-vibrations, and can send my own into your brain. I can speak orally—but there is no need for it. Your generation has not yet begun the mastery of thought—and mine actually has not progressed very far. Here in this period you shall meet intelligence rising to its perfection, a veritable Kingdom of Thought.”
They were crossing a particularly rough expanse of ice. Gorg Merlo’s communication ceased, and he narrowed his eyes as though concentrating on a problem. Don Steel’s thoughts were equally busy. Something seemed to be spurring his mind on to greater and greater activity. The little man had spoken of different generations—as—as though they belonged in different ages! Could it be that he was in some alien world—or some alien time? He could not accept so incredible an idea. He had read of such things in fiction—but they were mere baseless fantasies.
“The question uppermost in your mind,” Gorg Merlo interrupted his soliloquy, “I cannot answer. You are wondering how you came to be here, and in what age you belong. From the contour of your head and your apparel, I would say you belonged somewhere between the nineteenth and twenty-third centuries of the old time-recording system. And since you know nothing of the means of your coming, you must have been flung into the Time Channel without your knowledge.”
Don sensed Gorg Merlo’s next communication but faintly; something seemed to be prodding his memory—striving mightily to make him recall his past.
“You have entered an era of Thought—an age thousands of years, yes, even thousands of centuries removed from your own time. It is at such a remote point in the Channel that even I have no real conception of its age.”
SUDDENLY an excited cry burst from Don’s lips. Every faculty had been concentrated on his problem—and abruptly something had seemed to snap within his brain.
“I have it!” he exclaimed. “I have it! It’s all come back—all except how I got here. That wet street—the car skidding as I turned a corner—a crash—and blackness! But that doesn’t explain—this.” His face fell, as, with a wave of his hand, he indicated the forbidding world of ice.
Gorg Merlo resumed his communication. “I thought perhaps I could help you remember with the power of my mind—and the rest is easy. A little explanation of the mysteries of time, and you’ll understand exactly what happened.
“Time is a channel or a stream, endless and illimitable, wherein flows all creation in its infinite varieties and forms. Events, phenomena, past, present, and future, all exist simultaneously, but in different parts of the channel. There are currents in the Stream of Time—some, like the middle of an actual watercourse, rushing rapidly; others, the portions eddying and swirling along the banks, flowing more slowly—and the speed of all phenomena, the rapdity of “time,” is governed by the flow of those currents.
“I and my fellow scientists have become quite adept in fording the channel, moving from one current to another, thus traveling into either past or future. We would enter a slower channel, and be in our past. Or, upon entering a faster time course than our own, we would speed ahead into the future—ages as yet not reached by our present.
“I did that—reached this age—and was not permitted to leave.
“As for you—something, some catastrophe, must have launched you into a swifter current of the time steam and brought you here . . . And I am afraid you also will have to remain—even if you could get back!”
Dan looked at Gorg Merlo in consternation. He had read of time travel in fantastic fiction—but to have such a thing happen to him—it seemed incredible. Still—he had seen a prehistoric man, and a man far more highly developed mentally than himself, who could read his thoughts—excellent proof that the incredible had actually happened. He shrugged his shoulders. It was some experience, anyway.
Suddenly he clamped his jaws together and scowled. “Who’d try to keep me here, if I’d find a way to—get back?”
The little man grimaced and opened his mouth for the first time. “Ye’ll see ’em soon ’nough,” he said in a thin, quavering, uncertain voice, his words slurred, with whole syllables left out. “V’ry soon, prob’ly; Th’ Great Brains! . . . We’re ’proach’n’ th’ Kingd’m ‘f Tho’t. T lies ‘t th’ foot ’f th’t moun’n.”
The towering white mountain loomed up before them, its peak tinged with the red of the dying sun. Don decided that they had gone fully half the distance to the peak. Abruptly he stopped short.
“Why are we going to this place if we’re going to be made prisoners?” he demanded. “Isn’t there another—”
“For two reasons,” Gorg Merlo interrupted voicelessly. “In the first place, there are only two spots on earth in this period where life is possible, and the other is worse than this one. Secondly—look behind you!”
DON whirled—and his jaw fell. For behind them in an orderly row strode fifteen men, all dressed alike in heavy, glittering armor! They looked neither to right nor left, but stood motionless when Don paused. And high above them drifted what appeared to be a great human brain, all of five feet in diameter—a monstrous mass of grey matter surrounded by a dull gray membrane that did not conceal its countless convolutions. Beneath it dangled a tiny face and an equally tiny body, like that of a newborn infant, and as helpless as the weakest of babes. The entire being floated within an almost invisible, transparent gray sphere.
Speechlessly Don Steele turned to Gorg Merlo, his eyes expressing his bewilderment. The other smiled mirthlessly.
“That is what you must expect here,” he informed Don. “That gray brain is the Keeper. But they aren’t real—the men—only phantoms the Keeper created. That is, they possess substance, but no life. Even the floating brain and dangling body are only images of their creator—I think—though I cannot be sure.
Not real—yet they have the power to kill—by suggestion.”
Don blinked; then slowly his features set in an expression of dogged determination. He turned, looked up at the Great Brain—and laughed—grimly!
CHAPTER II
Exiles of Time
“GAD, what a city!” Don Steele breathed the words in awe. He was standing beside Gorg Merlo on the brink of an enormous white precipice, gazing down into a vast valley, their destination. The biting wind whistled shrilly as it swept past them; behind them and on either side stretched a bleak wilderness of ice—yet below them lay a valley apparently of tropical warmth, containing a city whose beauty and magnitude staggered the imagination.
They were looking through an intangible suggestion of a blue haze; Don noticed that it encircled the valley like a wall of light, as far as eye could reach; that it vanished overhead in the depths of the pink-tinted sky. And beyond the haze—that which Gorg Merlo had called the Kingdom of Thought!
“Beautiful!” The word came unbidden from the wonder that stunned Don’s thoughts. His mind was lost in a maze of chaotic impressions. A world of opalescent light, blending into an endless plain studded with Gargantuan jewels of dazzling radiance! A vast sea of gemlike splendor, alive with all the varying shades of the spectrum, whose billows of shimmering light swept on and on to vanish in the blue mist that obscured the foot of the distant mountain of ice!
Slowly, as the edge of his wonder dulled, order came out of confusion. The shifting maze of jewels resolved itself into a city of gleaming rounded domes, like an ocean of bubbles, all save one uniform in size, all varying in their delicately tinted coloring. That one, in the center of the vast city, was larger, even more resplendent, if that were possible. All seemed to gleam with a light of their own; it waxed and waned endlessly, like—like the pulsating of giant intellects! For some unaccountable reason the strange simile suggested itself to Don’s groping mind.