The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales Read online

  The door of the homorium swung slowly open, and a dim blue light engirded him as he stood limned in the aperture. The illumination came from deep within the homorium. Maljoc did not hesitate. Shouting and singing exultantly, he passed quickly through the luminous portal, down a long, dim corridor, and into a vast, rectangular chamber.

  The women of his race were standing about in little groups. Having reached maturity, they were discussing such grave and solemn topics as the past history of their kind and their future duties as obedient servants of the swarming master. Without hesitation, Maljoc moved into the center of the chamber.

  The women uttered little gasping cries of delight when they beheld him. Clustering boldly about him, they ran their slim white hands over his glistening tunic and caressed with fervor his beard and hair. They even gazed exultantly into his boyish gray eyes, and when he flushed they tittered.

  Maljoc was disturbed and frightened. Ceasing to sing, he backed away precipitously toward the rear of the chamber.

  Do not be afraid, said a tall, flaxen-haired virago at his elbow. We will not harm you.

  Maljoc looked at her. She was attractive in a bold, flamboyant way, but he did not like her. He tried to move away from her, but she linked her arm in his and pulled him back toward the center of the chamber.

  He cried out in protest. I do not like you! he exclaimed. You are not the kind of woman—

  The Amazon’s lips set in hard lines. You are far too young to know your own mind, she said. I will be a good wife to you.

  As she spoke, she thrust out a powerful right arm and sent three of her rivals sprawling.

  Maljoc was panic-stricken. He pleaded and struggled. The woman was pulling him toward the center of the chamber, and two of the other women were contending with her.

  The struggle terminated suddenly. Maljoc reeled, lost his balance, and went down with a thud on the hard metallic floor. The metal bruised his skull, stunning him.

  For several seconds a wavering twilight engulfed Maljoc’s faculties. Needles pierced his temples, and the relentless eyes of the Amazon burned into his brain. Then, slowly and painfully, his senses cleared, and his eyelids flickered open in confused bewilderment.

  Two compassionate blue eyes were gazing steadily down at him. Dazedly, Maljoc became aware of a lithely slim form, and a clear, lovely face. As he stared up in wonderment, the apparition moved closer and spoke in accents of assurance.

  I will not let them harm you, she said.

  Maljoc groaned, and his hand went out in helpless appeal. Slim, firm fingers encircled his palm, and a gentle caress eased the pain in his forehead.

  Gently he drew his comforter close and whispered: Let us escape from these devils.

  The woman beside him hesitated. She seemed both frightened and eager. I am only eight months old, she told him in a furtive whisper. I am really too young to go forth. They say, too, that it would be dangerous, for I am—

  A blush suffused her cheeks.

  She is dangerously beautiful, said a harsh voice behind her. The instructors here are indifferent to beauty, but when she goes forth she will be seized and impaled. You had better take me.

  Maljoc raised himself defiantly on his elbow. It is my privilege to choose, he said. And I take this woman. Will you go forth with me, my little one?

  The woman’s eyes opened widely. She looked slowly up at the Amazon, who was standing in the shadows behind her, and said in a voice which did not tremble: I will take this man. I will go forth with him.

  The Amazon’s features were convulsed with wrath. But she was powerless to intervene. Maljoc was privileged to choose, and the woman was privileged to accept. With an infuriated shrug she retreated farther into the shadows.

  Maljoc arose from the floor and gazed rapturously at his chosen mate. She did not evade his scrutiny. As Maljoc continued to stare at her, the strained look vanished from his face and mighty energies were released within him.

  He stepped to her and lifted her with impassioned chantings into the air. Her long hair descended and enmeshed his shoulders, and as he pressed her to his heart her arms tightened clingingly about him.

  The other women clustered quickly about the exultant couple. Laughing and nudging one another, they examined the strong biceps of the bridegroom and ran their fingers enviously through the woman’s dark hair.

  Maljoc ignored them. Holding his precious burden very firmly in his muscular arms, he walked across the chamber, down the long outer corridor, and out through the massive door. Above him in another moment the Cyclopean luminous cables loomed beneath far-glimmering stars. He walked joyfully along the sky promenade, chanting, singing, unquenchably happy in his little hour of triumph and rapture.

  The woman in his arms was unbelievably beautiful. She lay limply and calmly in his embrace, her eyes luminous with tenderness. Orion gleamed more brightly now, and the great horned moon was a silver fire weaving fantastically in and out of the nebulae-laced firmament.

  As Maljoc sang and chanted, the enormous droning shapes above him seemed mere alien intruders in a world of imperishable loveliness. He thought of himself now as lord of the earth and the sky, and the burden in his arms was more important in his sight than his destiny as a servitor and the benefits which the swarming masters had promised to bestow upon him if he served them diligently and well.

  He no longer coveted slave joys and gratifications. He wished to be forever his own master under the stars. It was a daring and impious wish, and as if aware of his insurgent yearnings a great form came sweeping down upon him out of the sky. For an instant it hovered with sonorously vibrating wings in the air above him. But Maljoc was so obsessed with joy that he ignored the chill menace of its presence. He walked on, and the woman in his arms shared his momentary forgetfulness.

  The end of their pathetic and insane dream came with a sickening abruptness. A great claw descended and gripped the woman’s slim body, tearing her with brutal violence from Maljoc’s clasp.

  The woman screamed twice shrilly. With a harsh cry, Maljoc leaped back. As he shook with horror, a quivering feeler brushed his forehead and spoke to him in accents of contempt:

  She is too beautiful for you, little one. Return to the homorium and choose another mate.

  Fear and awe of the swarming masters were instinctive in all men, but as the words vibrated through Maljoc’s brain he experienced a blind agony which transcended instinct. With a scream he leaped into the air and entwined his little hands about the enormous bulbous hairs on the master’s abdomen.

  The master made no attempt to brush him off. It spread its gigantic lacy wings and soared swiftly into the sky. Maljoc tore and pulled at the hairs in a fury of defiance. The swiftness of the flight choked the breath in his lungs, and his eyes were blinded by swirling motes of dust. But though his vision was obscured, he could still glimpse dimly the figure of the woman as she swung limply in the clasp of the great claw a few yards above him.

  Grimly, he pulled himself along the master’s abdomen toward the claw. He pulled himself forward by transferring his fingers from hair to hair. The master’s flat, broad stinger swung slowly toward him in a menacing arc, but he was sustained in his struggle by a sacrificial courage which transcended fear.

  Yet the stinger moved so swiftly that it thwarted his daring purpose. In a fraction of time his brain grew poignantly aware that the stinger would sear his flesh before he could get to his dear one, and the realization was like a knife in his vitals. In despair and rage, he thrust out his puny jaw and sank his teeth deep into the soft flesh beneath him. The flesh quivered.

  At the same instant the master swooped and turned over. Maljoc bit again. It screeched with pain and turned over and over, and suddenly, as it careened in pain, a white shape fell fr
om its claw.

  Maljoc caught the shape as it fell. With one hand clinging to the hair of the master’s palpitating abdomen, and the other supporting the woman of his choice, he gazed downward into the abyss.

  A mile below him the unfriendly earth loomed obscurely through riven tiers of cirrus clouds. But Maljoc did not hesitate. With a proud, exultant cry he tightened his hold on the woman and released his fingers from the hair.

  The two lovers fell swiftly to the earth. But in that moment of swooning flight that could end only in destruction, Maljoc knew that he was mightier than the masters, and having recaptured for an imperishable instant the lost glory of his race, he went without fear into darkness.

  GREEN GLORY

  Originally published in Astounding Stories, January 1935.

  As the tiny human shapes poured alertly through the subterranean artery, sharp clicks emanated from the magnetic audition disk in the roof of the passage. The clicks announced that the bee swarms were preparing to wage gruesome and relentless war.

  To the ant people and their tiny human servitors the bee army’s dissolving-fungus tissue was a menace that obscured the splendor of the sun and stars and the joys of shared labor in the sweet-smelling earth. In grim procession the midget shapes moved forward, and Atasmas sang and chanted as he led them. He sang of war and glory and sacrificial death. A huge yellow aphid sat perched on his gauze-clad shoulders and fed him as he advanced.

  In his inmost heart Atasmas despised the little stupid insect with its cumbersome-clawed tarsi. He knew that wingless aphids had once served the ant hordes with complaisant humility far back in the dim legendary ages when his own race was the opposite of complaisant. The aphids were mere contented cattle, mere unthinking milk producers for the omniscient ant people.

  Atasmas knew that he was nearly as insignificant as the aphids in the ant people’s sight, but he knew also that his own little race had once wielded immense power on earth, holding all other animal forms in abject thralldom. The aphids had never enslaved the hostile forces of nature, and had no idea of the majesty of the far-flung constellations and the vague, tender glory of the night shapes which visited men in dreams.

  Deep in the earth, in luminous damp tunnels Atasmas’ kind had labored, dreamed, and died for millions of years, enduring their little Mayfly span of life with ardent heroism, and remaining unflaggingly devoted to the ants’ exalted creeds, their world-subduing techniques.

  The ants were great. Even strong-willed men like Atasmas conceded it and were proud to serve as nurses for the large-brained grubs, as removers of excrement in the dark pits, and as relayers of such scented delicacies as the embalmed bodies of small spiders, roaches, and still smaller mammals. Along the damp, glowing tunnel Atasmas marched, the triumphant head of the tiny human procession that had formed by itself in response to the sharp clicks in the circular magnetic disk in the roof of the tunnel.

  “War formation—war formation—war formation,” announced the revolving disk, and Atasmas had marshaled the others into a smoothly progressing service line, thirty abreast.

  “A man should die gladly when the disks move,” he chanted. “With singing and rejoicing he should merge his little worthless personality in the great dream. When men die in defense of the great dream, the eggs in the abdomen of the queen mother are preserved for a destiny so great that—”

  The words froze suddenly on his lips. A circle of light appeared in the roof of the tunnel and a long, attenuated feeler fastened on his shoulder. The aphid hopped to the ground with a frightened screech. Atasmas groaned and his little body stiffened. He knew that incompetent men were lifted at frequent intervals from the tunnel by the small workers and carried up through long arteries and vertical chambers to the directing queen mothers in their luminous cells.

  At the thought of losing his comparative supremacy as a leader of his kind, Atasmas’ brain grew numb. He had thought himself secure, for he had served always with alertness and efficiency. But many were the sins of omission which a man could commit almost unconsciously, and Atasmas was sick with the thought that he had perhaps violated some minor but important taboo.

  The feeler laid him gently in repose in the center of an immense, chitin-armored back. Then the small worker began its slow ascent to the cells of the directing queens. From his vantage point on the insect’s back, Atasmas was privileged to survey with swift wonder the war preparations in a hundred intervening cells.

  He saw enormous, green-bellied grubs resting with a kind of repressed fervor in long earthen trenches filled with fungus-dissolving ichors. Their soft, flabby bodies absorbed the ichors with a spongelike greediness, and Atasmas knew that when the bee swarms dropped their deadly fungal tissues the grubs would be impregnable. Though the fungus poison filtered down through the damp earth to the lowest of the nursery cells, the dissolving ichors would protect the young maggots.

  * * * *

  Up through many cells Atasmas was carried. He saw enfeebled drones submitting with patient resignation to impregnation with the needle death. He knew that the drones would be spewed forth to mingle with the bee swarms and sow piercing agony in their midst. The needle death was a microscopic animalcule that propagated with unbelievable rapidity and feasted on insect viscera. Atasmas observed also huge, glistening black workers preening themselves for combat, and soldier ants with flattened heads a hundred feet in diameter which would be thrust into the enormous entrance vents above to serve as stopgaps against the downsweeping swarms of envenomed bees. He knew that the heads would be battered into loathsome pulps, and that the thin, flabby bodies beneath would writhe in unspeakable agony as the bees pierced them with their long stingers; but to the ant people death was a kind of rapturous dedication when it served a socially useful purpose. Something of this same sacrificial zeal flamed in the midget breast of the little creature on the insect’s back. He, too, was part of the enormous dream, and he would have died to save the maggots intrusted to his care as selflessly as the ants who owned him.

  There was an ominous vibratory stirring throughout the great central artery adjoining the cells of the directing queen mothers. Down it Atasmas was swiftly carried, his bearer moving with a sure-footed celerity uncommon in a small worker.

  For several minutes dark dripping surfaces swept past his upturned gaze, and a peculiarly fragrant odor assailed his nostrils. Then the glow deepened about him, and the small worker came to an abrupt halt before a towering barrier of wax. The barrier was fifty feet in height, and it shone with a radiance as of burnished metal. Without hesitation the insect raised its elbowed feeler and tapped lightly upon it. For an instant there was no response. Then the luminous partition bulged slowly outward, and the glistening globular head of a queen-preening ant emerged through it. Instantly the head withdrew, and through the rent thus produced the small worker moved with reverence into the cell of the directing queen.

  * * * *

  The queen cell was aglow with a soft blue radiance. As the little creature on the small worker’s back looked upward at the enormous swollen bulk of the single occupant of the cell, a great wonder came upon him. The eight slender scarlet rings encircling the majestic insect’s abdomen, and the green dots on her thoracic segments revealed that she was the supreme ruler of the colony, the great founder queen whose wisdom and power had filtered down as a legendary fable to the little human servitors in the depths.

  The small worker turned slowly on its side, and Atasmas slid from its back onto the soft, moist loam which covered the floor of the cell. Quickly he struggled to arise, to stand with dignity before this great being, whose power was so immense, and whose attributes were so godlike and omniscient. But his foot slipped as he rose from his knees, and he toppled over backward on the soft loam. He was rescued by the queen herself. Leaning slightly forward, she stretched forth a curving flagellum and set him gently on his feet. And then, as he stood staring reverent
ly up at her, she laid the flagellum on his forehead and spoke to him in speech that surged in cool vibrations through his tiny human brain.

  “You are wiser than all the others, little one. The others think first of themselves, but you think only of us. In your humble way you have the sublime, selfless mind of an insect.” In awed silence Atasmas continued to stare up into the great complex eyes, bulbous head, and swiftly pulsating thorax. A hundred feet above him she towered, and her immense, hairy abdomen bulged with its momentous burden of a hundred million eggs. Not even the planets in their courses were so awe-provoking in Atasmas’ sight.

  “Even the very humble can sometimes be of service,” said the queen mother. Still looking up, Atasmas gestured with his hands. He made a sign speech which conveyed that he had no mind apart from her mind; that her willing was the light of his little human life. The queen mother said: “Little one, the bee swarms are sweeping down upon us in envenomed fury. For a hundred millions years they have thwarted our dream of universal world dominion. Atasmas nodded, gestured, chanted. He understood. “You may use me as you will,” he conveyed.

  “I will have you carried to Agrahan where the bee swarms dwell in immense metallic hives,” resumed the queen mother. “You are so small that you can creep unobserved between the legs of the soldier guardian bees. You will carry into the inmost core of the central hive a spore of flarraeson.” Atasmas recoiled in horror. The color drained from his face and a tremor ran through him. Vague hints and rumors filtering down to the depths had obscurely revealed that flarraeson was a terrible vegetable petrifactive that fossilized all animal tissue.

  By a process of intensive hybridization the small workers had intensified the petrifactive principle of certain chlorophyll-forming organisms of high evolutionary grade, and had produced a miscroscopic animal-like plant so deadly and swift-blossoming that it was a menace to the great dream itself. It was rumored that a single spore of properly planted flarraeson would overrun hives miles in extent and envelop in petrifaction a billion helpless bees in the course of a single terrestrial revolution. So prolific, indeed, was the growth of this malignant plant that its deadly course could not be checked by any means known to insects.