The Creatures That Time Forgot - 3

"Now!" roared the three hundred watchers from the cliffs. "Now!" they
clamored, the men and women and children balanced, in turmoil on the
ledges. "Now! Begin!"
As if at a cue, the sun leaped high. It smote them a blow as with a
flat, sizzling stone. The two men staggered under the molten impact,
sweat broke from their naked thighs and loins, under their arms and on
their faces was a glaze like fine glass.
Nhoj shifted his huge weight and looked at the sun as if in no hurry to
fight. Then, silently, with no warning, he kanurcked out a pebble with
a startling trigger-flick of thumb and forefinger. It caught Sim flat
on the cheek, staggered him back, so that a rocket of unbearable pain
climbed up his crippled foot and burst into nervous explosion at the
pit of his stomach. He tasted blood from his bleeding cheek.
Nhoj moved serenely. Three more flickers of his magical hands and three
tiny, seemingly harmless bits of stone flew like whistling birds.
Each of them found a target, slammed it. The nerve centers of Sim's
body! One hit his stomach so that ten hours' eating almost slid up his
throat. A second got his forehead, a third his neck. He collapsed to
the boiling sand. His knee made a wrenching sound on the hard earth.
His face was colorless and his eyes, squeezed tight, were pushing tears
out from the hot, quivering lids. But even as he had fallen he had let
loose, with wild force, his handful of stones!
The stones purred in the air. One of them, and only one, struck Nhoj.
Upon the left eyeball. Nhoj moaned and laid his hands in the next
instant to his shattered eye.
Sim choked out a bitter, sighing laugh. This much triumph he had. The
eye of his opponent. It would give him ... Time. Oh, gods, he thought,
his stomach retching sickly, fighting for breath, this is a world of
time. Give me a little more, just a trifle!
Nhoj, one-eyed, weaving with pain, pelted the writhing body of Sim, but
his aim was off now, the stones flew to one side or if they struck at
all they were weak and spent and lifeless.
Sim forced himself half erect. From the corners of his eyes he
saw Lyte, waiting, staring at him, her lips breathing words of
encouragement and hope. He was bathed in sweat, as if a rain spray had
showered him down.
* * * * *
The sun was now fully over the horizon. You could smell it. Stones
glinted like mirrors, the sand began to roil and bubble. Illusions
sprang up everywhere in the valley. Instead of one warrior Nhoj he was
confronted by a dozen, each in an upright position, preparing to launch
another missile. A dozen irregular warriors who shimmered in the golden
menace of day, like bronze gongs smitten, quivered in one vision!
Sim was breathing desperately. His nostrils flared and sucked and his
mouth drank thirstily of flame instead of oxygen. His lungs took fire
like silk torches and his body was consumed. The sweat spilled from
his pores to be instantly evaporated. He felt himself shriveling,
shriveling in on himself, he imagined himself looking like his father,
old, sunken, slight, withered! Where was the sand? Could he move? Yes.
The world wriggled under him, but now he was on his feet.
There would be no more fighting.
A murmur from the cliff told this. The sunburnt faces of the high
audience gaped and jeered and shouted encouragement to their warrior.
"Stand straight, Nhoj, save your strength now! Stand tall and
perspire!" they urged him. And Nhoj stood, swaying lightly, swaying
slowly, a pendulum in an incandescent fiery breath from the skyline.
"Don't move, Nhoj, save your heart, save your power!"
"The Test, The Test!" said the people on the heights. "The test of the
sun."
And this was the worst part of the fight. Sim squinted painfully at the
distorted illusion of cliff. He thought he saw his parents; father with
his defeated face, his green eyes burning, mother with her hair blowing
like a cloud of grey smoke in the fire wind. He must get up to them,
live for and with them!
Behind him, Sim heard Lyte whimper softly. There was a whisper of flesh
against sand. She had fallen. He did not dare turn. The strength of
turning would bring him thundering down in pain and darkness.
His knees bent. If I fall, he thought, I'll lie here and become ashes.
Where was Nhoj? Nhoj was there, a few yards from him, standing bent,
slick with perspiration, looking as if he were being hit over the spine
with great hammers of destruction.
"Fall, Nhoj! Fall!" screamed Sim, mentally. "Fall, fall! Fall and die
so I can take your place!"
But Nhoj did not fall. One by one the pebbles in his half-loose left
hand plummeted to the broiling sands and Nhoj's lips peeled back, the
saliva burned away from his lips and his eyes glazed. But he did not
fall. The will to live was strong in him. He hung as if by a wire.
Sim fell to one knee!
"Ahh!" wailed the knowing voices from the cliff. They were watching
death. Sim jerked his head up, smiling mechanically, foolishly as if
caught in the act of doing something silly. "No, no," he insisted
drowsily, and got back up again. There was so much pain he was all one
ringing numbness. A whirring, buzzing, frying sound filled the land.
High up, an avalanche came down like a curtain on a drama, making no
noise. Everything was quiet except for a steady humming. He saw fifty
images of Nhoj now, dressed in armours of sweat, eyes puffed with
torture, cheeks sunken, lips peeled back like the rind of a drying
fruit. But the wire still held him.
"Now," muttered Sim, sluggishly, with a thick, baked tongue between his
blazing teeth. "Now I'll fall and lie and dream." He said it with slow,
thoughtful pleasure. He planned it. He knew how it must be done. He
would do it accurately. He lifted his head to see if the audience was
watching.
They were gone!
The sun had driven them back in. All save one or two brave ones. Sim
laughed drunkenly and watched the sweat gather on his dead hands,
hesitate, drop off, plunge down toward sand and turn to steam half way
there.
Nhoj fell.
The wire was cut. Nhoj fell flat upon his stomach, a gout of blood
kicked from his mouth. His eyes rolled back into a white, senseless
insanity.
Nhoj fell. So did his fifty duplicate illusions.
All across the valley the winds sang and moaned and Sim saw a blue lake
with a blue river feeding it and low white houses near the river with
people going and coming in the houses and among the tall green trees.
Trees taller than seven men, beside the river mirage.
"Now," explained Sim to himself at last, "Now I can fall.
Right--into--that--lake."
He fell forward.
He was shocked when he felt the hands eagerly stop him in mid-plunge,
lift him, hurry him off, high in the hungry air, like a torch held and
waved, ablaze.
"How strange is death," he thought, and blackness took him.
* * * * *
He wakened to the flow of cool water on his cheeks.
He opened his eyes fearfully. Lyte held his head upon her lap, her
fingers were moving food to his mouth. He was tremendously hungry
and tired, but fear squeezed both of these things away. He struggled
upward, seeing the strange cave contours overhead.
"What time is it?" he demanded.
"The same day as the contest. Be quiet," she said.
"The same day!"
She nodded amusedly. "You've lost nothing of your life. This is Nhoj's
cave. We are inside the black cliff. We will live three extra days.
Satisfied? Lie down."
"Nhoj is dead?" He fell back, panting, his heart slamming his ribs. He
relaxed slowly. "I won. Gods, I won," he breathed.
"Nhoj is dead. So were we, almost. They carried us in from outside only
in time."
He ate ravenously. "We have no time to waste. We must get strong. My
leg--" He looked at it, tested it. There was a swathe of long yellow
grasses around it and the ache had died away. Even as he watched
the terrific pulsings of his body went to work and cured away the
impurities under the bandages. It _has_ to be strong by sunset, he
thought. It _has_ to be.
He got up and limped around the cave like a captured animal. He felt
Lyte's eyes upon him. He could not meet her gaze. Finally, helplessly,
he turned.
She interrupted him. "You want to go on to the ship?" she asked,
softly. "Tonight? When the sun goes down?"
He took a breath, exhaled it. "Yes."
"You couldn't possibly wait until morning?"
"No."
"Then I'll go with you."
"No!"
"If I lag behind, let me. There's nothing here for me."
They stared at each other a long while. He shrugged wearily.
"All right," he said, at last. "I couldn't stop you, I know that. We'll
go together."

IX
They waited in the mouth of their new cave. The sun set. The stones
cooled so that one could walk on them. It was almost time for the
leaping out and the running toward the distant, glittering metal seed
that lay on the far mountain.
Soon would come the rains. And Sim thought back over all the times
he had watched the rains thicken into creeks, into rivers that cut
new beds each night. One night there would be a river running north,
the next a river running north-east, the third night a river running
due west. The valley was continually cut and scarred by the torrents.
Earthquakes and avalanches filled the old beds. New ones were the order
of the day. It was this idea of the river and the directions of the
river that he had turned over in his head for many hours. It might
possibly--Well, he would wait and see.
He noticed how living in this new cliff had slowed his pulse, slowed
everything. A mineral result, protection against the solar radiations.
Life was still swift, but not as swift as before.
"Now, Sim!" cried Lyte, testing the valley air.
They ran. Between the hot death and the cold one. Together, away from
the cliffs, out toward the distant, beckoning ship.
Never had they run this way in their lives. The sound of their feet
running was a hard, insistent clatter over vast oblongs of rock, down
into ravines, up the sides, and on again. They raked the air in and out
their lungs. Behind them the cliffs faded away into things they could
never turn back to now.
They did not eat as they ran. They had eaten to the bursting point in
the cave, to save time. Now it was only running, a lifting of legs, a
balancing of bent elbows, a convulsion of muscles, a slaking in of air
that had been fiery and was now cooling.
"Are they watching us?"
Lyte's breathless voice snatched at his ears, above the pound of his
heart.
Who? But he knew the answer. The cliff peoples, of course. How long had
it been since a race like this one? A thousand days? Ten thousand? How
long since someone had taken the chance and sprinted with an entire
civilization's eyes upon their backs, into gullies, across cooling
plain. Were there lovers pausing in their laughter back there, gazing
at the two tiny dots that were a man and woman running toward destiny?
Were children eating of new fruits and stopping in their play to see
the two people racing against time? Was Dienc still living, narrowing
hairy eyebrows down over fading eyes, shouting them on in a feeble,
rasping voice, shaking a twisted hand? Were there jeers? Were they
being called fools, idiots? And in the midst of the name calling, were
people praying them on, hoping they would reach the ship? Yes, under
all the cynicism and pessimism, some of them, all of them, must be
praying.
Sim took a quick glance at the sky, which was beginning to bruise with
the coming night. Out of nowhere clouds materialized and a light shower
trailed across a gully two hundred yards ahead of them. Lightning beat
upon distant mountains and there was a strong scent of ozone on the
disturbed air.
"The halfway mark," panted Sim, and he saw Lyte's face half turn,
longingly looking back at the life she was leaving. "Now's the time, if
we want to turn back, we still have time. Another minute--"
* * * * *
Thunder snarled in the mountains. An avalanche started out small and
ended up huge and monstrous in a deep fissure. Light rain dotted Lyte's
smooth white skin. In a minute her hair was glistening and soggy with
rain.
"Too late now," she shouted over the patting rhythm of her own naked
feet. "We've got to go ahead!"
And it was too late. Sim knew, judging the distances, that there was no
turning back now.
His leg began to pain him a little. He favored it, slowing. A wind
came up swiftly. A cold wind that bit into the skin. But it came from
the cliffs behind them, helped rather than hindered them. An omen? he
wondered. No.
For as the minutes went by it grew upon him how poorly he had estimated
the distance. Their time was dwindling out, but they were still an
impossible distance from the ship. He said nothing, but the impotent
anger at the slow muscles in his legs welled up into bitterly hot tears
in his eyes.
He knew that Lyte was thinking the same as himself. But she flew along
like a white bird, seeming hardly to touch ground. He heard her breath
go out and in her throat, like a clean, sharp knife in its sheathe.
Half the sky was dark. The first stars were peering through lengths of
black cloud. Lightning jiggled a path along a rim just ahead of them. A
full thunderstorm of violent rain and exploding electricity fell upon
them.
They slipped and skidded on moss-smooth pebbles. Lyte fell, scrambled
up again with a burning oath. Her body was scarred and dirty. The rain
washed over her.
The rain came down and cried on Sim. It filled his eyes and ran in
rivers down his spine and he wanted to cry with it.
Lyte fell and did not rise, sucking her breath, her breasts quivering.
He picked her up and held her. "Run, Lyte, please, run!"
"Leave me, Sim. Go ahead!" The rain filled her mouth. There was water
everywhere. "It's no use. Go on without me."
He stood there, cold and powerless, his thoughts sagging, the flame of
hope blinking out. All the world was blackness, cold falling sheathes
of water, and despair.
"We'll walk, then," he said. "And keep walking, and resting."
They walked for fifty yards, easily, slowly, like children out for a
stroll. The gully ahead of them filled with water that went sliding
away with a swift wet sound, toward the horizon.
Sim cried out. Tugging at Lyte he raced forward. "A new channel," he
said, pointing. "Each day the rain cuts a new channel. Here, Lyte!" He
leaned over the flood waters.
He dived in, taking her with him.
The flood swept them like bits of wood. They fought to stay upright,
the water got into their mouths, their noses. The land swept by on both
sides of them. Clutching Lyte's fingers with insane strength, Sim felt
himself hurled end over end, saw flicks of lightning on high, and a new
fierce hope was born in him. They could no longer run, well, then they
would let the water do the running for them.
With a speed that dashed them against rocks, split open their
shoulders, abraded their legs, the new, brief river carried them. "This
way!" Sim shouted over a salvo of thunder and steered frantically
toward the opposite side of the gully. The mountain where the ship
lay was just ahead. They must not pass it by. They fought in the
transporting liquid and were slammed against the far side. Sim leaped
up, caught at an overhanging rock, locked Lyte in his legs, and drew
himself hand over hand upward.
As quickly as it had come, the storm was gone. The lightning faded. The
rain ceased. The clouds melted and fell away over the sky. The wind
whispered into silence.
"The ship!" Lyte lay upon the ground. "The ship, Sim. This is the
mountain of the ship!"
Now the cold came. The killing cold.
They forced themselves drunkenly up the mountain. The cold slid along
their limbs, got into their arteries like a chemical and slowed them.
Ahead of them, with a fresh-washed sheen, lay the ship. It was a dream.
Sim could not believe that they were actually so near it. Two hundred
yards. One hundred and seventy yards. Gods, but it was cold.
[Illustration: _Ahead of them lay the ship. Sim could not believe they
were so near._]
The ground became covered with ice. They slipped and fell again and
again. Behind them the river was frozen into a blue-white snake of cold
solidity. A few last drops of rain from somewhere came down as hard
pellets.
Sim fell against the bulk of the ship. He was actually touching it.
Touching it! He heard Lyte whimpering in her constricted throat. This
was the metal, the ship. How many others had touched it in the long
days? He and Lyte had made it!
He touched it lovingly. Then, as cold as the air, his veins were
chilled.
Where was the entrance?
You run, you swim, you almost drown, you curse, you sweat, you work,
you reach a mountain, you go up it, you hammer on metal, you shout with
relief, you reach the ship, and then--you can't find the entrance.
* * * * *
He fought to keep himself from breaking down. Slowly, he told himself,
but not too slowly, go around the ship. The metal slid under his
searching hands, so cold that his hands, sweating, almost froze to it.
Now, far around to the side. Lyte moved with him. The cold held them
like a fist. It began to squeeze.
The entrance.
Metal. Cold, immutable metal. A thin line of opening at the sealing
point. Throwing all caution aside, he beat at it. He felt his stomach
seething with cold. His fingers were numb, his eyes were half frozen in
their sockets. He began to beat and search and scream against the metal
door. "Open up! Open up!" He staggered.
The air-lock sighed. With a whispering of metal on rubber beddings, the
door swung softly sidewise and vanished back.
He saw Lyte run forward, clutch at her throat, and drop inside a small
shiny chamber. He shuffled after her, blankly.
The air-lock door sealed shut behind him.
He could not breathe. His heart began to slow, to stop.
They were trapped inside the ship now, and something was happening. He
sank down to his knees and choked for air.
The ship he had come to for salvation was now slowing his pulse,
darkening his brain, poisoning him. With a starved, faint kind of
expiring terror, he realized that he was dying.
Blackness.
* * * * *
He had a dim sense of time passing, of thinking, struggling, to make
his heart go quick, quick.... To make his eyes focus. But the fluid in
his body lagged quietly through his settling veins and he heard his
temple pulses thud, pause, thud, pause and thud again with lulling
intermissions.
He could not move, not a hand or leg or finger. It was an effort to
lift the tonnage of his eyelashes. He could not shift his face even, to
see Lyte lying beside him.
From a distance came her irregular breathing. It was like the sound a
wounded bird makes with his dry, unraveled pinions. She was so close he
could almost feel the heat of her; yet she seemed a long way removed.
I'm getting cold! he thought. Is this death? This slowing of blood, of
my heart, this cooling of my body, this drowsy thinking of thoughts?
Staring at the ship's ceiling he traced its intricate system of tubes
and machines. The knowledge, the purpose of the ship, its actions,
seeped into him. He began to understand in a kind of revealing
lassitude just what these things were his eyes rested upon. Slow. Slow.
There was an instrument with a gleaming white dial.
Its purpose?
He drudged away at the problem, like a man underwater.
People had used the dial. Touched it. People had repaired it.
Installed it. People had dreamed of it before the building, before
the installing, before the repairing and touching and using. The
dial contained memory of use and manufacture, its very shape was a
dream-memory telling Sim why and for what it had been built. Given
time, looking at anything, he could draw from it the knowledge he
desired. Some dim part of him reached out, dissected the contents of
things, analyzed them.
This dial measured time!
Millions of days of time!
But how could that be? Sim's eyes dilated, hot and glittering. Where
were humans who needed such an instrument?
Blood thrummed and beat behind his eyes. He closed them.
Panic came to him. The day was passing. I am lying here, he thought,
and my life slips away. I cannot move. My youth is passing. How long
before I can move?
Through a kind of porthole he saw the night pass, the day come, the day
pass, and again another night. Stars danced frostily.
I will lie here for four or five days, wrinkling and withering, he
thought. This ship will not let me move. How much better if I had
stayed in my home cliff, lived, enjoyed this short life. What good has
it done to come here? I'm missing all the twilights and dawns. I'll
never touch Lyte, though she's here at my side.
Delirium. His mind floated up. His thoughts whirled through the metal
ship. He smelled the razor sharp smell of joined metal. He heard the
hull contract with night, relax with day.
Dawn.
Already--another dawn!
Today I would have been mature. His jaw clenched. I must get up. I must
move. I must enjoy my time of maturity.
But he didn't move. He felt his blood pump sleepily from chamber to red
chamber in his heart, on down and around through his dead body, to be
purified by his folding and unfolding lungs. Then the circuit once more.
The ship grew warm. From somewhere a machine clicked. Automatically the
temperature cooled. A controlled gust of air flushed the room.
Night again. And then another day.
He lay and saw four days of his life pass.
He did not try to fight. It was no use. His life was over.
He didn't want to turn his head now. He didn't want to see Lyte with
her face like his tortured mother's--eyelids like gray ash flakes, eyes
like beaten, sanded metal, cheeks like eroded stones. He didn't want to
see a throat like parched thongs of yellow grass, hands the pattern of
smoke risen from a fire, breasts like desiccated rinds and hair stubbly
and unshorn as moist gray weeds!
And himself? How did _he_ look? Was his jaw sunken, the flesh of his
eyes pitted, his brow lined and age-scarred?
* * * * *
His strength began to return. He felt his heart beating so slow that it
was amazing. One hundred beats a minute. Impossible. He felt so cool,
so thoughtful, so easy.
His head fell over to one side. He stared at Lyte. He shouted in
surprise.
She was young and fair.
She was looking at him, too weak to say anything. Her eyes were like
tiny silver medals, her throat curved like the arm of a child. Her hair
was blue fire eating at her scalp, fed by the slender life of her body.
Four days had passed and still she was young ... no, younger than when
they had entered the ship. She was still adolescent.
He could not believe it.
Her first words were, "How long will this last?"
He replied, carefully. "I don't know."
"We are still young."
"The ship. Its metal is around us. It cuts away the sun and the things
that came from the sun to age us."
Her eyes shifted thoughtfully. "Then, if we stay here--"
"We'll remain young."
"Six more days? Fourteen more? Twenty?"
"More than that, maybe."
She lay there, silently. After a long time she said, "Sim?"
"Yes."
"Let's stay here. Let's not go back. If we go back now, you know
what'll happen to us...?"
"I'm not certain."
"We'll start getting old again, won't we?"
He looked away. He stared at the ceiling and the clock with the moving
finger. "Yes. We'll grow old."
"What if we grow old--instantly. When we step from the ship won't the
shock be too much?"
"Maybe."
Another silence. He began to move his limbs, testing them. He was very
hungry. "The others are waiting," he said.
Her next words made him gasp. "The others are dead," she said. "Or will
be in a few hours. All those we knew back there are old and worn."
He tried to picture them old. Dark, his sister, bent and senile with
time. He shook his head, wiping the picture away. "They may die," he
said. "But there are others who've been born."
"People we don't even know," said Lyte, flatly.
"But, nevertheless, _our_ people," he replied. "People who'll live only
eight days, or eleven days unless we help them."
"But we're _young_, Sim! We're young! We can _stay_ young!"
He didn't want to listen. It was too tempting a thing to listen to. To
stay here. To live. "We've already had more time than the others," he
said. "I need workers. Men to heal this ship. We'll get on our feet
now, you and I, and find food, eat, and see if the ship is movable. I'm
afraid to try to move it myself. It's so big. I'll need help."
"But that means running back all that distance!"
"I know." He lifted himself weakly. "But I'll do it."
"How will you get the men back here?"
"We'll use the river."
"_If_ it's there. It _may_ be somewhere else."
"We'll wait until there _is_ one, then. I've got to go back, Lyte.
The son of Dienc is waiting for me, my sister, your brother, are old
people, ready to die, and waiting for some word from us--"
After a long while he heard her move, dragging herself tiredly to him.
She put her head upon his chest, her eyes closed, stroking his arm.
"I'm sorry. Forgive me. You have to go back. I'm a selfish fool."
He touched her cheek, clumsily. "You're human. I understand you.
There's nothing to forgive."
* * * * *
They found food. They walked through the ship. It was empty. Only in
the control room did they find the remains of a man who must have been
the chief pilot. The others had evidently bailed out into space in
emergency lifeboats. This pilot, sitting at his controls, alone, had
landed the ship on a mountain within sight of other fallen and smashed
crafts. Its location on high ground had saved it from the floods. The
pilot himself had died, probably of heart failure, soon after landing.
The ship had remained here, almost within reach of the other survivors,
perfect as an egg, but silent, for--how many thousand days? If the
pilot had lived, what a different thing life might have been for the
ancestors of Sim and Lyte. Sim, thinking of this--felt the distant,
ominous vibration of war. How had the war between worlds come out? Who
had won? Or had both planets lost and never bothered trying to pick up
survivors? Who had been right? Who was the enemy? Were Sim's people of
the guilty or innocent side? They might never know.
He checked the ship hurriedly. He knew nothing of its workings, yet
as he walked its corridors, patted its machines, he learned from it.
It needed only a crew. One man couldn't possibly set the whole thing
running again. He laid his hand upon one round, snout-like machine. He
jerked his hand away, as if burnt.
"Lyte!"
"What is it?"
He touched the machine again, caressed it, his hand trembled violently,
his eyes welled with tears, his mouth opened and closed, he looked at
the machine, loving it, then looked at Lyte.
"With this machine--" he stammered, softly, incredulously. "With--with
this machine I can--"
"What, Sim?"
He inserted his hand into a cup-like contraption with a lever inside.
Out of porthole in front of him he could see the distant line of
cliffs. "We were afraid there might never be another river running by
this mountain, weren't we?" he asked, exultantly.
"Yes, Sim, but--"
"There _will_ be a river. And I _will_ come back, tonight! And I'll