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In: Short Stories·Science-Fiction & Fantasy·American Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #76849.
The opening · free to read
Tork was a simple man of the caves. How could he dream that the star box held the power to make his people gods--or only a lost memory in stone?
The urge was part of an Antarean experiment in artificial ecological imbalance, though of course the cave-folk could not guess that. They were savages with no interest in science or, indeed, in anything much except filling their bellies and satisfying other primal urges. They inhabited a series of caves in a chalk formation above a river that ran through primordial England and France before it joined the Rhine and emptied into the sea.
They did not understand the urge at all--which was natural. It followed the disappearance of the ship from Antares by a full two hours, so they saw no connection between the two. Anyhow, it was just a vague, indefinite desire to move to the eastward--an impulse for which they had no explanation whatever.
Tork was spearing fish from a rock out in the river when the ship passed overhead. He was a young man, still gangling and awkward. He wasn’t up to a fight with One-Ear, yet, and had a bad time in consequence. One-Ear was the boss male of the cave-dwellers’ colony in the cliff over the river. He wanted to chase Tork away or kill him, and Tork had to be on guard every second. But he felt safe out on his rock.
He had just speared a fine ganoid when he heard a howl of terror from the shore. He jerked his head around. He saw Bent-Leg, the other adult male, go hobbling in terror toward his own cave-mouth, and he saw One-Ear knock two of his wives and three children off the ladder to his cave, so he could get in first. The others shrieked and popped into whatever crevice was at hand, including the small opening in which Tork himself slept when he dared. Then there was stillness.
Tork stared blankly. He saw no cause for alarm ashore. He ran his eyes along the top of the cliff. He saw birch and beech and oak, growing above the chalk. His eyes swept the stream. There were old-men’s stories of sea-monsters coming all the way up from the deep bay (which would some day be the English Channel). But the surface of the river was undisturbed. He scanned the farther shore. There were still a few of the low-browed ogres from whom Tork’s people had taken this land, but Tork knew that he could outrun or outswim them. And there were none of them in sight, either.
All was quiet. Tork grew curious, and stood up on his rock. Then he saw the ship.
It was an ovoid of polished, silvery metal. It was huge, two hundred feet by three hundred, and it floated tranquilly a hundred yards above the tree-tops. It moved to the stream, and then drifted smoothly in a new direction up the river. It was going to pass directly over Tork’s head.
It was so strange as to be unthinkable, and therefore it smote Tork with a terror past expression. He froze into a paralytic stillness, staring up at it. It made no sound. It had no features. Its perfectly reflecting sides presented to Tork’s dazed eyes a distorted oval reflection of the river and the stream-banks and the cliffs and all the countryside for many miles around. He did not recognize the reflection. To him it seemed that the thing’s hide was mottled, and that the mottlings shifted in a horrifying fashion.
It floated on, unwavering, as if its mass were too great to be affected by the gentle wind. Tork stood frozen in the ultimate catalepsy of a man faced with terror neither to be fought or fled from. He did not see the small, spidery frameworks built out from the shining hull. He did not see the tiny tubes moving this way and that, as if peering. He did not see several of the tubes converging upon him. He was numbed, dazed.
Nothing happened. The silver ovoid swam smoothly up above the river. Presently the river curved, and the ship from Antares went on tranquilly above the land. A little later it rose to clear a range of low hills. Later still, it vanished behind them.
When he recovered, Tork swam ashore with his fish, shouting vaingloriously that there was nothing to be afraid of. Heads popped timorously into view. Children appeared first, then grown-ups. One-Ear appeared last of all, with his red-rimmed eyes and whiskery truculence. There were babblings. Then--they died down. The cave-folk could not talk about the thing. They had no words for it. There were no precedents, however far-fetched, to compare it with. They babbled of their fright, but they could not talk about its cause.
In an hour, it appeared to have been forgotten. Tork cooked his fish. When his belly was quite full, a young girl named Berry stopped cautiously some yards away from him. She was at once shy and bold.
“You have much fish,” she said, with a toss of her head.
“Too much,” said Tork complacently. “I need a woman to help eat it.”
He looked at her. She was most likely One-Ear’s daughter, but she was slim and curved and desirable where he was bloated and gross and bad-tempered. An interesting, speculative idea occurred to Tork. He grinned tentatively.
She said, “One-Ear smelled your fish. He sent me to get some. Shall I tell him he is a woman if he eats it?”
Her eyes were intent; not quite mocking. Tork scowled. To let her give such a message would be to challenge One-Ear to mortal combat, and One-Ear was twenty years older and sixty pounds heavier than Tork. He tossed the girl a fish, all cooked and greasy as it was.
“I give you the fish,” said Tork grandly. “Eat it or give it to One-Ear. I don’t care!”
She caught the fish expertly. Her eyes lingered on him as she turned away. She turned again to peer at him over her shoulder as she climbed the ladder to One-Ear’s cave.
At just about that time the urge came to Tork. He suddenly wanted to travel to eastward.
Travel, to the cave-folk, was peril undiluted. They had clubs and fish-spears which were simply sharpened sticks. They had nothing else. Wolves had not yet been taught to fear men. The giant hyena still prowled the wild. There were cave-bears and innumerable beasts no man of Tork’s people could hope to cope with save by climbing the nearest tree. To want to travel anywhere was folly. To travel eastward, where a saber-tooth was rumored to den, was madness. Tork decided not to go.
But the urge remained exactly as strong as before. He summoned pictures of monstrous dangers. The urge did not deny them. It did not combat them. It simply ignored them. Tork wanted to travel to the east. He did not know why.
After half an hour, during which Tork struggled with himself, he saw the girl Berry come out of One-Ear’s cave. She began to crack nuts for One-Ear’s supper, using two stones. One-Ear’s teeth were no longer sound enough to cope with nuts.
Tork looked at her. Presently an astounding idea came to him. He saw that the girl glanced furtively at him sometimes. He made a secret beckoning motion with his hand. After a moment, Berry got up and moved to throw a handful of nutshells into the stream. She stood idly watching them float away. She was only a few feet from Tork.
“I go to the east,” said Tork in a low voice, “to look for a better cave than here.”
Her eyes flicked sidewise to him, but she gave no other sign. She did not move away, either. Tork elaborated: “A fine cave. A deep cave, where there is much game.”
She glanced at him again out of the corners of her eyes. Tork’s own eyes abruptly burned. He said, greatly daring: “Then I will come and take you to it!”
The girl tossed her head. Among the cave-folk, property-right in females--even one’s own daughters--preceded all other forms of possession. Were One-Ear to hear of this invasion of his proprietary rights, there would be war to the death immediately. But the girl did not move away; she did not laugh. Tork felt vast pride and enormous ambition stir within him. After a long, breathless instant the girl turned away from the water and went back to the pounding of nuts for One-Ear. On the way her eyes flickered to Tork. She smiled a faint, almost frightened smile. That was all.
But it was enough to send Tork off within the next half-hour with his club in his hand and high romantic dreamings in his heart--and a quite sincere conviction that he was moving eastward to find a cave in which to set up housekeeping.
Because of this, the journey became adventure. Once Tork was treed by a herd of small, piggish animals rather like the modern peccary. Once he fled to the river and dived in because of ominous rustlings which meant he was being stalked by something he didn’t wait to identify. And when, near nightfall, he picked a tree to sleep in, and started to climb it, he was halfway up to its lowest branch when he saw the ropelike doubling of the thickness of a slightly higher branch. He got down without rousing the great serpent, and went shivering for three miles--eastward--before he chose another tree to sleep in. But before he went to sleep he arranged these incidents into quite heroic form, suitable to be recounted to Berry.
Tork went on at sunrise. He paused once to stuff himself with blackberries--and left that spot via nearby trees when something grunting and furry charged him. In mid-morning he heard a far-away, earth-shaking sound that could come from nothing but saber-tooth himself. Then he heard a curious popping noise that he had never heard before, and the snarl ceased abruptly. The hair fairly stood up on Tork’s head. But the urge to move eastward was very strong indeed now. It seemed to grow stronger as he traveled. No other creatures seemed to feel it, however. Squirrels frisked in the trees. Once he saw a monstrous elk--the so-called Irish elk--whose antlers had a spread of yards. The monster looked at him with a stately air and did not flee. Tork was the one who gave ground, because the cave-folk had no missile weapons save stones thrown by hand. He made a circuit around the great beast.
Then he abruptly ran into tumbled ground, where there were practically no trees but very many rocks. It would be a perfect place for lying-in-wait. Also he saw the mouths of several very promising caves. If the urge had not become uncontrollably strong, he would have stopped to investigate them. But he went on. Once his sensitive nostrils smelled carrion, mingled with the musky animal odor of a great carnivore. Mentally he went into gibbering terror. In his mind he fled at top speed. But the urge was incredibly strong. He went on like someone possessed. He had freedom to dodge, to creep stealthily, to take every precaution for silence and to avoid the notice of the animals which had no need to fear one club-armed man. He could even run--provided he fled to eastward. It was no longer possible for him to turn back.
The urge continued to strengthen. After some miles he became an automaton--a blank-faced gangling figure, sun-bronzed and partly clad in an untanned hide. He carried a club and in his belt there was a sharpened stick which was his idea of a fish-spear. He trudged onward, his eyes unseeing, automatically adjusting his steps to the ground, apathetically moving around great masses of stone in his way. He was, for a time, completely at the mercy of any carnivore which happened to see him.
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