Public-domain ebook
What Hath Me?
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Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #63796.
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[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The man running through the forest gloom breathed in hot, panting gusts, pain tearing at his chest. Underfoot the crawling, pale network of tree-trunks lay flat upon the ground, and more than once he tripped over a slippery bole and crashed down, but he was up again instantly.
He had no breath to scream. He sobbed as he ran, his burning eyes trying to pierce the shadows. Whispers rustled down from above. When the leaf-ceiling parted, a blaze of terribly bright stars flamed in the jet sky. It was cold and dark, and the man knew that he was not on Earth.
They were following him, even here.
A squat yellow figure, huge-eyed, inhuman, loomed in his path--one of the swamp people of Southern Venus. The man swung a wild blow at the thing, and his fist found nothing. It had vanished. But beyond it rose a single-legged giant, a Martian, bellowing the great, gusty laughter of the Redland Tribes. The man dodged, stumbled, and smashed down heavily. He heard paddling footsteps and tried, with horrible intensity of purpose, to rise. He could not.
The Martian crept toward him--but it was no longer a Martian. An Earthman, with the face of some obscene devil, came forward with a sidling, slow motion. Horns sprouted from the low forehead. The teeth were fangs. As the creature came nearer, it raised its hands--twisted, gnarled talons--and slid them about the man's throat.
Through the forest thundered the deep, booming clangor of a brass gong. The sound shattered the phantom as a hammer shatters glass. Instantly the man was alone.
Making hoarse, animal sounds in his throat, he staggered upright and lurched in the direction from which the sound came. But he was too weak. Presently he fell, and this time he did not rise. His arms moved a little and then were still. He slept, lines of tortured weariness twisting the haggard face.
Very faintly, from infinite distances, he heard a voice ... two voices. Inhuman. Alien--and yet with a warmth of vital urgency that stirred something deep within him.
"_He has passed our testing._"
Then a stronger, more powerful voice--answering.
"_Others have passed our testing--but the Aesir slew them._"
"_There is no other way. In this man I sensed something--a little different. He can hate--he has hated._"
"_He will need more than hatred_--" the deeper voice said. "_Even with us to aid him. And there is little time. Strip his memories from him now, so that he may not be weakened by them_--"
"_May the gods fight with him._"
"_But he fights the gods. The only gods men know in these evil days_--"
The man awakened.
Triphammers beat ringingly inside his skull. He opened his eyes and closed them quickly against the sullen red glow that beat down from above. He lay motionless, gathering his strength.
What had happened?
He didn't know. The jolting impact of that realization struck him violently. He felt a brief panic of disorientation. Where--?
I'm Derek Stuart, he thought. At least it isn't complete amnesia. I know who I am. But not where I am.
This time when he opened his eyes they stayed open. Overhead a broad-leafed tree arched. Through its branches he could see a dark, starry sky, the glowing, ringed disc of Saturn very far away, and a deeply scarlet glow.
Not Earth, then. A Saturnian moon? No, Saturn didn't eclipse most of the sky. Perhaps the asteroid belt.
He moved his head a little, and saw the red moon.
Aesir!
The message rippled along his nerves into his brain. Stuart reacted instantly. His hard, strong body writhed, whipped over, and then he was in a half-crouch, one hand flashing to his belt while his eyes searched the empty silence of the forest around him. There was no sound, no movement.
Sweat stood on Stuart's forehead, and he brushed it away impatiently. His deeply-tanned face set into harsh lines of curiously hopeless desperation. There was no blaster gun at his belt; that didn't matter. Guns couldn't help him now--on Asgard.
The red moon had told him the answer. Only one world in the System had a red moon, and men didn't go to that artificial asteroid willingly. They went, yes--but only to be doomed and damned. From Venus to Callisto spacemen spoke of Asgard in hushed voices--Asgard where the Aesir lived and ruled the worlds of Man.
No spaceships left Asgard, except the sleek black cruisers manned by the priests of Aesir. No man had ever returned from Asgard.
Stuart grinned mirthlessly. He'd learned a lesson, though he'd never profit by it now. Always before he'd been confident of his ability to outdrink anyone of his own weight and size. And certainly that slight, tired-eyed man at the Singing Star, in New Boston, should have passed out long before Stuart--under normal circumstances.
So the circumstances hadn't been quite normal. It was a frame. A beautiful, air-tight frame, because he'd never come back to squawk. Nobody came back from Asgard.
He shivered a little and looked up warily. There were legends, of course. The Watchers who patrolled the asteroid ceaselessly--robots, men said. They served the Aesir. As, in a way, all men served the Aesir.
No sound. No movement. Only the sullen crimson light beating down ominously from that dark sky.
Stuart took stock of his clothing. Regular leatheroid spaceman's rig; they'd left him that, anyway. Whoever they were. He couldn't remember anything that had happened after the fifth drink with the tired-eyed man. There was a very faint recollection of running somewhere--seeing unpleasant things--and hearing two oddly unreal voices. But the memories slipped away and vanished as he tried to focus on them.
The hell with it. He was on Asgard. And that meant--something rather more unpleasant than death, if the legends were to be believed. A very suitable climax to an unorthodox life, in this era when obedience and law enforcement were the rigid rule.
Stuart picked up a heavy branch that might serve as a club. Then, shrugging, he turned westward, striking at random through the forest. No use waiting here till the Watchers came. At least--he could fight, as he had always fought as far back as he could remember.
There wasn't much room for fighters any more. Not under the Aesir rule. There were nations and kings and presidents, of course, but they were puppet figures, never daring to disobey any edicts that came from the mystery-shrouded asteroid hanging off the orbit of Mars, the tiny, artificial world that had ruled the System for a thousand years.
The Aesir. The inhuman, cryptic beings who--if legend were true--once had been human. Stuart scowled, trying to remember.
An--an entropic accelerator, that was it. A device, a method that speeded up evolution tremendously. That had been the start of the tyranny. A machine that could accelerate a man's evolution by a million years--
Some had used that method. Those were the ones who had become the Aesir, creatures so far advanced in the evolutionary scale that they were no longer remotely human. Much was lost in the mists of the past. But Stuart could recall that much--the knowledge that the Aesir had once been human, that they were human no longer, and that for a thousand years they had ruled the System, very terribly, from their forbidden asteroid that they named Asgard--home of the legendary Norse gods.
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