The Narrow Land Read online

  They passed through the outlaw-ridden belt of dark stars, and into a region of space unknown but for tales let slip by drunken Clantlalan renegades-reports of planets covered with mighty ruins, legends of an asteroid littered with a thousand wrecked spaceships. Other tales were even more incredible. A dragon who tore spaceships open in its jaws purportedly wandered through this region, and it was said that alone on a desolate planet a godlike being created worlds at his pleasure.

  The signals in the detector cell presently grew so strong that Lanarck slackened speed for fear that, overshooting his quarry, the cell would lose its thread of radiation. Now Isabel May began to swing out toward the star-systems which drifted past like fireflies, as if she sought a landmark. Always the signals in the detector cell grew stronger.

  A yellow star waxed bright ahead. Lanarck knew that the ship of Isabel May was close at hand. Into that yellow star's system he followed her, and lined out the trail toward the single planet. Presently, as the planet globed out before him, the signals ceased entirely.

  The high clear atmosphere braked the motion of Lanarck's space-boat. He found below a dun, sun-baked landscape. Through the telescope the surface appeared to be uniformly stony and flat. Clouds of dust indicated the presence of high winds.

  He had no trouble finding Isabel May's ship. In the field of his telescope lay a cubical white building: the only landmark visible from horizon to horizon. Beside the building sat Isabel May's silver spaceboat. Lanarck swooped to a landing, half expecting a bolt from her needle-beam. The port of the spaceboat hung open, but she did not show herself as he came down on his crash-keel close by.

  The air, he found, was breathable. Buckling on his needle-beam, he stepped out on the stony ground. The hot gale tore at him, buffeting his face, whipping tears from his eyes. Wind-flung pebbles bounding along the ground stung his legs. Light from the sun burned his shoulders.

  Lanarck inspected the terrain, to discover no sign of life, either from the white building or from Isabel May's space-boat. The ground stretched away, bare and sun-drenched, far into the dusty distances. Lanarck looked to the lonely white structure. She must be within. Here was the end of the chase which had brought him across the galaxy.

  Lanarck circled the building. On the leeward side he found a low dark archway. From within came the heavy smell of life: an odor half animal, half reptile. He approached the entrance with his needle-beam ready.

  He called out: "Isabel May!" He listened. The wind whistled by the corner of the building; little stones clicked past, blowing down the endless sun-dazzled waste. There was no other sound.

  A sonorous voice entered his brain. "The one you seek is gone." Lanarck stood stock-still.

  "You may come within, Earthman. We are not enemies." The archway loomed dark before him. Step by step he entered. After the glare of the white sun the dimness of the room was like a moonless night Lanarck blinked.

  Slowly objects about him assumed form. Two enormous eyes peered through the gloom; behind appeared a tremendous domelike bulk. Thought surged into Lanarck's brain. "You are unnecessarily truculent. Here will be no occasion for violence."

  Lanarck relaxed, feeling slightly at a loss. Telepathy was not often practiced upon Earth. The creature's messages came like a paradoxically silent voice, but he had no knowledge how to transmit his own messages. He hazarded the experiment.

  "Where is Isabel May?"

  "In a place inaccessible to you."

  "How did she go? Her spaceboat is outside, and she landed but a half-hour ago."

  "I sent her away."

  Keeping his needle-beam ready, Lanarck searched the building. The girl was nowhere to be found. Seized by a sudden, fearful thought, he ran to the entrance and looked out. The two spaceboats were as he had left them. He shoved the needle-beam back into the holster and turned to the leviathan, in whom he sensed benign amusement.

  "Well, then-who are you and where is Isabel May?"

  "I am Laoome," came the reply. "Laoome, the one-time Third of Narfilhet, Laoome the World-Thinker - the Final Sage of the Fifth Universe ... As for the girl, I have placed her, at her own request, upon a pleasant but inaccessible world of my own creation."

  Lanarck stood perplexed.

  "Look!" Laoome said.

  Space quivered in front of Lanarck's eyes. A dark aperture appeared in midair. Looking through, Lanarck saw hanging apparently but a yard before his eyes a lambent sphere-a miniature world. As he watched, it expanded like a toy balloon.

  Its horizons vanished past the confines of the opening, Continents and oceans assumed shape, flecked with cloud-wisps. Polar ice caps glinted blue-white in the light of an unseen sun. Yet all the time the world seemed to be but a yard distant. A plain appeared, rimmed by black, flinty mountains. The color of the plain, a ruddy ocher, he saw presently, was due to a forest carpet of rust-colored foliage. The expansion ceased.

  The World-Thinker spoke: "That which you see before you is matter as real and tangible as yourself. I have indeed created it through my mind. Until I dissolve it in the same manner, it exists. Reach out and touch it."

  Lanarck did so. It was actually only a yard from his face, and the red forest crushed like dry moss under his fingertips.

  "You destroyed a village," commented Laoome, and caused the world to expand once more at a breathtaking rate, until the perspectives were as if Lanarck hung a hundred feet above the surface. He was looking into the devastation which his touch had wrought a moment before. The trees, far larger than he had supposed, with boles thirty or forty feet through, lay tossed and shattered. Visible were the ruins of rude huts, from which issued calls and screams of pain, thinly audible to Lanarck. Bodies of men and women lay crushed. Others tore frantically at the wreckage.

  Lanarck stared in disbelief. "There's life! Men!"

  "Without life, a world is uninteresting, a lump of rock. Men, like yourself, I often use. They have a large capacity for emotion and initiative, a flexibility to the varied environments which I introduce."

  Lanarck gazed at the tips of his fingers, then back to to the shattered village. "Are they really alive?"

  "Certainly. And you would find, should you converse with one of them, that they possess a sense of history, a racial heritage of folklore, and a culture well-adapted to their environment."

  "But how can one brain conceive the detail of a world? The leaves of each tree, the features of each man-"

  "That would be tedious," Laoome agreed. "My mind only broadly conceives, introduces the determinate roots into the hypostatic equations. Detail then evolves automatically."

  "You allowed me to destroy hundreds of these-men."

  Curious feelers searched his brain. Lanarck sensed Laoome's amusement.

  "The idea is repugnant? In a moment I shall dissolve the entire world... . Still, if it pleases you, I can restore it as it was. See!"

  Immediately the forest was unmarred, the village whole again, secure and peaceful in a small clearing.

  Awareness came to Lanarck of a curious rigidity in the rapport he had established with the World-Thinker. Looking about, he saw that the great eyes had glazed, that the tremendous black body was twitching and jerking. Now Laoome's dream-planet was changing. Lanarck leaned forward in fascination. The noble red trees had become gray rotten stalks and were swaying drunkenly. Others slumped and folded like columns of putty.

  On the ground balls of black slime rolled about with vicious energy pursuing the villagers, who in terror fled anywhere, everywhere.

  From the heavens came a rain of blazing pellets. The villagers were killed, but the black slime-things seemed only agonized. Blindly they lashed about, burrowed furiously into the heaving ground to escape the impacts. More suddenly than it had been created, the world vanished. Lanarck tore his gaze from the spot where the world had been. He looked about and found Laoome as before.

  "Don't be alarmed." The thoughts came quietly. "The seizure is over. It occurs only seldom, and why it should be I do not know. I ima
gine that my brain, under the pressure of exact thought, lapses into these reflexive spasms for the sake of relaxation. This was a mild attack. The world on which I am concentrating is usually totally destroyed."

  The flow of soundless words stopped abruptly. Moments passed. Then thoughts gushed once more into Lanarck's brain.

  "Let me show you another planet-one of the most interesting I have ever conceived. For almost a million Earth years it has been developing in my mind."

  The space before Lanarck's eyes quivered. Out in imaginary void hung another planet. As before, it expand until the features of the terrain assumed an earthly perspective. Hardly a mile in diameter, the world was divided around the equator by a belt of sandy desert. At one end glimmered a lake, at the other grew a jungle of lush vegetation.

  From this jungle now, as Lanarck watched, crept a semi-human shape. A travesty upon man, its face was long, chinless and furtive, with eyes beady and quick. The legs were unnaturally long; the shoulders and arms were undeveloped. It slunk to the edge of the desert, paused a moment, looking carefully in both directions, then began a mad dash through the sand to the lake beyond.

  Halfway across, a terrible roar was heard. Over the the horizon bounded a dragonlike monster. With fearsome speed it pursued the fleeing man-thing, who outdistanced it and gainied the edge of the desert by two hundred feet. When the dragon came to the limits of the sandy area, it halted abd bellowed an eerie mournful note which sent shivers down Lanarck's spine. Casually now, the man-thing loped to the lake, threw himself flat and drank deeply.

  "An experiment in evolution," came Laoome's thought "A million years ago those creatures were men like yourself. This world is oddly designed. At one end is food, at the other drink. In order to survive, the 'men' must cross the desert every day or so. The dragon is prevented from leaving the desert by actinic boundaries. Hence, if the men can cross the desert, they are safe.

  "You have witnessed how admirably they have adapted to the environment. The women are particularly fleet, for they have adjusted to the handicap of caring for their young. Sooner or later, of course, age overtakes them and their speed gradually decreases until finally they are caught and devoured

  "A curious religion and set of taboos have evolved here. I am worshipped as the primary god of Life, and Shillal, as they call the dragon, is the deity of Death. He, of course, is the basic concern of their lives and colors all their thoughts. They are close to elementals, these folk. Food, drink, and death are intertwined for them into almost one concept.

  "They can build no weapons of metal against Shillal, for their world is not endowed with the raw materials. Once, a hundred thousand years ago, one of the chiefs contrived a gigantic catapult, to hurl a sharp-pointed tree trunk at Shillal. Unluckily, the fibers of the draw-cord snapped and the chief was killed by the recoil. The priests interpreted this as a sign and-

  "Look there! Shillal catches a weary old woman, sodden with water, attempting to return to the jungle!"

  Lanarck witnessed the beast's great gulping.

  "To continue," Laoome went on, "a taboo was created, and no further weapons were ever built."

  "But why have you forced upon these folk a million years of wretched existence?" asked Lanarck.

  Laoome gave an untranslatable mental shrug. "I am just, and indeed benevolent," he said. "These men worship me as a god. Upon a certain hillock, which they hold sacred, they bring their sick and wounded. There, if the whim takes me, I restore them to health. So far as their existence is concerned, they relish the span of their lives as much as you do yours."

  "Yet, in creating these worlds, you are responsible for the happiness of the inhabitants. If you were truly benevolent, why should you permit disease and terror to exist?"

  Laoome again gave his mental shrug. "I might say that I use this universe of our own as a model. Perhaps there is another Laoome dreaming out the worlds we ourselves live on. When man dies of sickness, bacteria live. Dragon lives by eating man. When man eats, plants and animals die."

  Lanarck was silent, studiously preventing his thoughts from rising to the surface of his mind.

  "I take it that Isabel May is upon neither of these planets?"

  "That is correct."

  "I ask that you make it possible for me to communicate with her."

  "But I put her upon a world expressly to assure her safety from such molestation."

  "I believe that she would profit by hearing me."

  "Very well," said Laoome. "In justice I should accord to you the same opportunity that I did her. You may proceed to this world. Remember, however, the risk is your own, exactly as it is for Isabel May. If you perish upon Markawel, you are as thoroughly dead as you might be upon Earth. I do not play Destiny to influence either one of your lives."

  There was a hiatus in Laoome's thoughts, a whirl of ideas too rapid for Lanarck to grasp. At last Laoome's eyes focused upon him again. An instant of faintness as Lanarck felt knowledge forced into his brain.

  As Laoome silently regarded him, it occurred to Lanarack that Laoome's body, a great dome of black flesh, was singularly ill-adapted to life on the planet where he dwelt.

  "You are right," came the thoughts of Laoome. "From Beyond unknown to you I came, banished from the dead planet Narfilhet, in whose fathomless black waters I swam. This was long ago, but even now I may not return." Laoome lapsed once more into introspection.

  Lanarck moved restlessly. Outside the wind tore past the building. Laoome continued silent, dreaming perhaps of the dark oceans of ancient Narfilhet. Lanafck impatiently launched a thought.

  "How do I reach Markawel? And how do I return?"

  Laoome fetched himself back to the present. His eyes settled upon a point beside Lanarck. The aperture which led into his various imaginary spaces was now wrenched open the third time. A little distance off in the void, a spaceboat drifted. Lanarck's eyes narrowed with sudden interest.

  "That's a 45-G-my own ship!" he exclaimed.

  "No, not yours. One like it. Yours is still outside." The craft drew nearer? gradually floated within reach.

  "Climb in," said Laoome. "At present Isabel May is in the city which lies at the apex of the triangular continent." "But how do I get back?"

  "Aim your ship, when you leave Markawel, at the brightest star visible. You will then break through the mental dimensions into this universe."

  Lanarck reached his arm into the imaginary universe and pulled the imagined space-boat close to the aperture. He opened the port and gingerly stepped in as Laoome's parting thoughts reached him.

  "Should you fall into danger, I can not modify the natural course of events. On the other hand, I will not intentionally place dangers in your way. If such befall you, it will be due solely to circumstance."

  Lanarck slammed shut the port, half expecting the ship to dissolve under his feet. But the ship was solid enough. He looked back. The gap into his own universe had disappeared, leaving in its place a brilliant blue star. He found himself in space. Below glimmered the disk of Markawel, much like other planets he had approached from the void. He tugged at the throttle, threw the nose hard over and down. Let the abstracts take care for themselves. The boat dropped down at Markawel.

  It seemed a pleasant world. A hot white sun hung off in space; blue oceans covered a large part of the surface. Among the scattered land masses he found the triangular continent. It was not large. There were mountains with green-forested slopes and a central plateau: a not un-Earth-like scene, and Lanarck did not feel the alien aura which surrounded most extraterrestrial planets.

  Sighting through his telescope Lanarck found the city, sprawling and white, at the mouth of a wide river. He sent his ship streaking down through the upper atmosphere, then slowed and leveled off thirty miles to sea. Barely skimming the sparkling blue waves, he flew toward the city.

  A few miles to the left an island raised basalt cliffs against the ocean. In his line of sight there heaved up on the crest of a swell a floating black object. After
an instant it disappeared into the trough: a ramshackle raft. Upon it a girl with tawny golden hair desperately battled sea-things which sought to climb aboard.

  Lanarck dropped the ship into the water beside the raft The wash threw the raft up and over and down on the girl.

  Lanarck slipped through the port and dived into clear green water. He glimpsed only sub-human figures paddling downward, barely discernible. Bobbing to the surface, he swam to the raft, ducked under, grasped the girl's limp form, pulled her into the air.

  For a moment he clung to the raft to catch his breath, while holding the girl's head clear of the water. He sensed the return of the creatures from below. Dark forms rose in the shadow cast by the raft, and a clammy, long-fingered hand wound around his ankle. He kicked and felt his foot thud into something like a face. More dark forms came up from the depths. Lanarck measured the distance to his spaceboat, Forty feet. Too far. He crawled onto the raft, and pulled the girl after him. Leaning far out, he recovered the paddle and prepared to smash the first sea-thing to push above water. But instead, they swam in tireless circles twenty feet below.

  The blade of the paddle had broken, Lanarck could not move the unwieldly bulk of the raft. The breeze, meanwhile, was easing the spaceboat even farther away. Lanarck exerted himself another fifteen minutes, pushing against the water with the splintered paddle, but the gap increased He cast down the paddle in disgust and turned to the girl, who, sitting cross-legged, regarded him thoughtfully. For no apparent reason, Lanarck was reminded of Laoome in the dimness of his white building, on the windy world. All this, he thought, looking from clear-eyed girl to heaving sun-lit sea to highlands of the continent ahead, was an idea in Laoome's brain.

  He looked back at the girl. Her bright wheat-colored hair frothed around her head in ringlets, producing, thought Lanarck, a most pleasant effect. She returned his gaze for a moment, then, with jaunty grace, stood up.

  She spoke to Lanarck who found to his amazement that he understood her. Then, remembering Laoome's manipulation of his brain, extracting ideas, altering, instilling new concepts, he was not so amazed.