Message From the Eocene Read online

  Message from the Eocene

  (1964)**

  Margaret St. Clair

  Chapter One

  It was an honor, he supposed. When the administrators had wanted to be sure the mysteriously-arrived volume would get through safe from Synon to Gwynor, the strongest of the allied cities, where it would be studied, they had selected a diver, one of the hardy, resourceful breed of surface-visitors, to carry it. But as Tharg listened to the rapid triple beat of his heart—thug thug thug, thug thug thug—he felt it was an honor he might have done without.

  The truth of it was, he was frightened. It wasn't only the exertion of the long slugging trek over the ridges that was making his heart beat so. From the start he had feared an attack might be made on him. But so soon? Here? He was hardly well over the ridges from Synon. He would have to climb considerably higher than this before he was done.

  There came another lightning flash. The faint green line he had been following, his guide to a route where the radioactivity would be mild enough to allow his blood to be oxygenated, was for a moment obliterated in the blinding light. Then the detonation of thunder, a long, long roll.

  The flash had struck through the billowy surface of the clouds below him. First there had been his exceptional difficulty in picking up the guiding green line, and now these incessant flashes of light. If this was an attack—but how could lightning come from clear sky naturally?—it was certainly a very odd one. He had expected to be attacked by the Vedimi, with whom his city was currently at war. But they would never have been able to strike at him like this.

  It was not that lightning was unfamiliar to him. In his brief professional dives down to the dank earth surface for the oxides his city's technology had to have, he had seen plenty of it. But on the sunny peaks above the clouds?

  Another flash, a tremendous one. It was intimidatingly close; they were all close. Tharg bit his lip. He could feel his body hair stand up. The crash followed almost immediately.

  Oh, he was being hunted. He had little doubt of it now. It was almost as if he were being herded, pushed away from the green line that meant safety. But by whom?

  If the Vedimi weren't attacking him, then who was? No wonder his heart was beating so fast.

  Oh, there were stories. Tharg had heard plenty of them in his first years. If Tharg's people had not originated on this raw young world, the third planet out from its young hot sun (and there were good anatomical reasons for thinking that they had not), they must have come here from somewhere else. And that would mean they must have been brought here, since they were only now learning how to overcome this planet's gravitational field. They could never have come here by themselves.

  In other words, the Vaeaa, the half-mythical overlords under whose ambiguous aegis the culture of Tharg's people was said to have grown up. The absentee landlords of this crude young Earth! Tharg, like other skeptically-minded members of his race, had never quite believed in their existence. He didn't know how his people had managed to get to this planet, but he thought it was unnecessary to lug in the Vaeaa to account for it. Believing in them was about like believing in thought reading, or moving objects at a distance without physical contact, or predicting the future. The Vaeaa seemed a part of the veiled, sniggering world of occultism, a world that was partly taboo and partly merely silly. Such things sickened him.

  Besides, why would the Vaeaa be hunting him? Tharg didn't know the exact nature of what he was carrying, but he hardly thought it would be of interest to beings powerful enough to have transplanted a whole people from the surface of one planet to another. It had arrived mysteriously; but he could scarcely think that the Vaeaa, who were most plausibly explained as being personified solar myths, would want to get their hands on it.

  No, it must be the Vedimi who were attacking him, after all. The controlled lightning flashes must be a new weapon of theirs. If that was the case, the war with them would shortly be getting hot.

  Another bolt of lightning, so close that Tharg could smell a tiny sting of ozone in the nearly oxygenless air. The long roaring boom followed immediately.

  Tharg had jumped back. His eyeballs felt seared. When he could see again, he found that the green line in the rock, the line he had been following from Synon, was quite gone. He couldn't pick it up again anywhere within eyeshot. And a big snow-covered rock to his right had been riven in two by the flash.

  Tharg felt his chest muscles grow tight. He wasn't in any immediate danger of asphyxiation; he had an emergency supply of thoracic flora in his knapsack, though he didn't know what he'd do if he couldn't pick up the green line eventually. But it must be the Vedimi, after all. The directed lightning flashes had seemed to have the green line as their target, and it was exactly like the Vedimi's nasty tricks to try to choke a fellow to death, in flat defiance of the inter-city covenant about the sanctity of the green line.

  Tharg managed a grin. Now that he had positively identified his attackers, he felt a little better. And after all, he was not unarmed. When the administrators had sent him out on his mission, they had equipped him with a new and very well-recommended weapon. He felt in the fleshy pouch between his shoulder muscles. Yes, the little flat box was still there.

  The only trouble was, he had no idea where his attackers were. The Vedimi who were going boom-boom at him obviously had him under visual observation, but they might be in a plane so high as to be invisible from the ground (also forbidden by the inter-city covenant, but what of that?). Or they might be watching him via a scanning device in Krax, their capital, or in Dannor, or in any of their cities in between. His weapon was pretty good, but it wasn't miraculous.

  For a moment he thought of doing an "earth-dive"—of plunging through the layer of, clouds to the dank, dark surface below. The Vedimi would never be able to follow him, and because of his special training he could stand almost a day's deprivation of radiant energy without serious discomfort. The danger of blundering into a pocket of intense radioactivity wouldn't be any more severe than it was up here without the green line to guide him.

  But nothing would really be accomplished by doing a dive. He'd have to come up sometime, and the Vedimi could just wait, scanning for him, until he reappeared. Up on the ridges, he had at least the possibility of getting through to Gwynor. Under the clouds, where magnetism and radioactivity made any sort of direction-detection impossible, he could only flounder about. His job, after all, was to get the book to Gwynor. He'd stay up.

  Tharg did not breathe in any ordinary human sense. His blood was oxygenated by thoracic flora that broke down metallic oxides to release free oxygen. But now he made a motion with his shoulders that, for an air-breather, was the equivalent of a sigh. He'd have to try to pick up the green line.

  When he'd left Synon this morning, he'd thought fleetingly of taking some sort of radiation-burst counter with him. Even now he didn't regret having decided against it. The compact counters became unreliable in a few hours of exposure, when they were worse than useless, and the sturdy ones were so bulky it took a couple of people to carry them. It was the radioactive background of this raw young world, more than any other single thing, that made it so hard for Tharg's people to get along in it.

  The line shouldn't be too difficult to pick up, if only the Vedimi would lay off the lightning for a little while. It was about time for another flash.

  Tharg closed his eyes. What he was about to do always made him feel a little squeamish, though he knew most divers did it and, he supposed, a good many people who weren't divers at all. Nonvisual perception was conventionally considered slightly indecent and more than slightly silly. Yet it worked. He'd proved it many times. Better get on with it.

  Eyes tightly shut, he spent an instant pull
ing his consciousness inside his skull. It took him a little longer than usual, because he was afraid of being interrupted by another of those damnable lightning bolts. Then, when Tharg's mind was tucked neatly inside his cerebellum, he made an act of will and began to look with his deeply buried inner eye.

  Farther, and up. He ranged. The viewscape he saw was done in dull red, except where potassium salts stood out in pale blue. Back and forth, as if he were walking over the snow hunting the vanished green line.

  Another lightning flash. Tharg was too busy to pay much attention to it; he noted with a part of his brain that it was less intense, to judge by the thunder, than the last had been. Back and forth, farther and farther. Wasn't he ever going to pick up the blasted thing? He wouldn't be able to keep this up much longer; third-eye seeing was a very fatiguing thing.

  At last, much lower down the rock ridge than he would have expected, he caught sight of it. He turned his head toward it, and opened his eyes. It was far beyond his normal visual range, but ten minutes' walk should get him there. The Vedimi had certainly done a good job of wiping it out.

  The lightning, oddly enough, held off. About halfway to the line, Tharg began to feel faint. He fumbled in his pouch for a capsule—a fresh dose of thoracic flora—and swallowed it. Ah. He felt better now.

  He gained the comparative safety of the green line at last. From the time he had stood with his eyes shut, trying to pick up the line nonvisually, there had been no more crashes of lightning, and this forbearance on the part of his attackers struck Tharg as ominous. Or were the lightning flashes, after all, a perfectly natural phenomenon—natural, but infrequent—which nobody had noticed until now?

  Tharg couldn't be sure, but he decided that if more bolts of lightning came, he would try something he ought to have thought of before: he would flop around a little and then collapse on the snow, in as realistic an imitation as he could give of a person who had been struck by lightning. If his attackers saw him lying unconscious, probably dead, they ought to come in close to get the book away from him. And that would give him a chance to find out whether the little ochloa-bolt gun the administrators had given him really was any good.

  The going was rougher here than it had been when the faint green line was higher. Patches of slushy methane snow alternated with big drifts, also soft, of frozen water vapor. But no more lightning flashes came, and the painful thug thug thug of his heart slowed to a more normal beat. In this vacation from alarm he realized how intimidated he had been.

  The green line began to ascend the ridge ... As Tharg climbed, the drifts grew more sparse and he made better time. At last he was walking right along the ridge, with a panorama of lesser peaks outspread below him. Off to the left he saw a thread of ascending smoke that marked a volcano. If he could keep up his present rate of progress he ought to reach Gwynor well before night.

  The green line dipped for a few hundred feet and then ascended again. Tharg realized he was hungry. He fumbled in his pouch for a handful of food pellets, and crunched them as he walked along. There had been no lightning for so long that he felt quite reassured. He began to speculate about the book he was carrying.

  In the first place, why was he so sure it was a book? Somebody had told him so, but he couldn't remember who; it certainly hadn't been the administrators. He himself had had no opportunity to examine it. When he had put it in his pouch he had seen that the book, or whatever, was encased in a hard smooth dark-brown outer covering, ellipsoidal in shape, about five inches big on its long axis and three on its shorter one. He hadn't noticed any way of opening it. That was all he knew from personal observation. If it was a book, it couldn't be a very big one.

  In the second place, what about the object's mysterious origin? Tharg had heard—again, not from the administrators—that a citizen of Synon had been quietly standing on his roof one morning, imbibing radiant energy for the day, when the book had come floating gently down through the air and landed placidly at his feet. Tharg didn't know whether the thing had been just as it was now—a three by five ellipsoid—or whether it had had a further protective shell.

  At any rate the citizen—variously identified as a scientist, an engineer, or a psychologist—had examined the thing. He had become convinced it was valuable and had taken it to the administrators. And they had thought it was important enough to dispatch Tharg to carry it, on foot and armed with the latest weapon, from Synon to Gwynof.

  (Why had they chosen to send the book by foot messenger rather than by plane? Tharg supposed it was because a plane was so conspicuous, in the present state of hostilities, that it was almost certain to be attacked. But a solitary traveller, slugging his way on foot over the rock ridges, might hope to get through unobserved.)

  By now it was at least an hour and a half since the last flash of lightning. Tharg felt so safe he allowed himself the luxury of regretting that he hadn't had the opportunity to try out his plan of faking being thunder-struck. He was thinking that he'd certainly get to Gwynor by mid-afternoon when, without any warning at all, there came an enormous lightning burst.

  It was the great grand-daddy of all lightning flashes. There was no need for Tharg to fake being stunned; it knocked him silly. For a considerable time he lay on the rock semiconscious, and when he began to come back to himself his thoughts were odd and erratic.

  Abruptly Tharg realized where he was. He had sense enough not to sit up.

  This lightning flash had been directed at him. That meant the Vedimi would be putting in an appearance shortly. Slowly, trying to avoid any visible movement, Tharg felt in his pouch. He drew out the flat little box and waited.

  He was far too shaken to try to pick up the Vedimi by nonvisual means. He lay with his eyelids open a slit, listening intently, trying to look as if he were still unconscious.

  The first intimation he had that anybody had arrived was neither visual nor auditory. He felt a soundless jarring in the rock under him, quite unlike anything in his experience. It seemed to pierce through his skull and make his bones vibrate like a tuning fork. Surprised, he opened his eyes.

  Still well up in the air, but descending slowly, was an extraordinary craft. A central globe hung rapidly rotating between two motionless horizontal wings, and like a star the heart shot out corruscations of colored light. The craft itself seemed to be a dull neutral color. Tharg couldn't imagine why the Vedimi had picked such an unconventional design. It must have something to do with the lightning flashes they had thrown at him.

  He hesitated. In order to aim the ochloa-bolt weapon accurately, he'd have to sit up, and as soon as he got upright the people in the craft would realize that he wasn't unconscious. If they threw another flash at him, he'd be electrocuted. At this distance, they couldn't miss.

  It might be better to wait until the craft was just landing. The crew's attention would be distracted then. But in order to keep the craft in sight as it came down, he'd have to move, and that would give the show away anyhow. Besides, he was too anxious to lie quiet that long. He'd have to try it while he could still move.

  He was lying with his ochloa-box arm stretched out behind his head. He tensed his muscles. Then he snapped his torso upright, while his arm came down like a whip. At the proper moment, he fired.

  He knew he had made a clean hit. He had been dead on center of the Vedimi ship, and by now everybody in it should be unconscious or dead. He felt the transient giddiness the administrators had warned him to expect.

  The craft continued to float slowly down. Well, that was reasonable. Leisurely, now that he had nothing to fear, Tharg got to his feet and waited. He didn't know what would happen when the craft touched the surface. It would depend on whether it had an automatic pilot or not.

  He waited. The ship touched the earth as gently as a feather and settled down. The central member, now revealed as a regular polyhedron, ceased to rotate. Three of its facets opened out.

  Tharg licked his lips. Would an automatic pilot—? He waited, hand ready on the ochloa-bolt. People
were coming out.

  They had high domed heads, bulging at the back of the skull, thin lips, long faces. They were tall, a good two feet taller than Tharg. They—they—

  It couldn't be. The Vedimi in that ship were all dead. The Vedimi—the—The Vaeaa. The semi-mythical overlords of his race. The Vaeaa. The absentee landlords had come home.

  Tharg stood for a moment transfixed. Then he threw down the useless ochloa-bolt gun and ran down the slope toward the layer of mist. He plunged into it.

  -

  Chapter Two

  He had fled on impulse, in blind revulsion at his helplessness toward a myth made suddenly actual. They had not tried to stop him, and that was odd.

  Now, not yet halfway through the cloud layer toward the surface, he was wondering whether he hadn't, after all, jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. Would it have been wiser simply to have surrendered to them? For the surface was dangerous—only a diver who had visited it frequently could quite realize how dangerous it was.

  The seas of boiling mud, the geysers, the landslides of the foci of radioactive metals were enveloped in perpetual darkness. The features of vulcanism changed so constantly that mapping them, even if possible, would have been useless. The most stable thing about the surface was its incessant flux. And, finally, the combination of darkness, danger and augmented atmospheric pressure was apt to produce hallucinations in divers if they stayed down for more than an hour. Tharg had once seen a fellow diver rip off his asbestos suit and plunge into a sink hole of boiling, sulphurous mud, while he babbled something about needing a bath.

  There were prophylactic measures against these dangers, of course—protective suits against the geysers and the mud, helmet lamps against the darkness, and constant caution against unforeseeable natural entrapment. As for the hallucinations, the only recognized way of dealing with them was to be strict in limiting one's stay on the surface.

  Tharg had neither helmet light nor protective suit, and if he had any serious hope of foiling the Vaeaa, he might have to stay down considerably longer than an hour.