The Edge Of Forever

by Chad Oliver

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An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.
Notes

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Dale Jonston gripped the palisade logs until his knuckles went white with strain and tiny droplets of blood began to form under his fingernails. The humid air choked his throat and a cold sweat beaded his forehead and trickled down the inside of his ETS shirt.

Start, his tense mind whispered. Why don’t you start?

The massed black clouds rolled over his head like a dark sea suspended in the air. Drums of thunder throbbed in the west and an electric hush charged the atmosphere. Lightning flickered in ghost-flames around the distant peaks of the Hills of the Dead.

It was the Time of the Terror—and the Terror was coming.

“It will be soon now,” a low voice echoed his thoughts.

Dale Jonston jumped inwardly at the sound and then forced himself to relax. He turned around. A tall native stood there watching him, a faint smile playing across his proud face. In the murky haze the light blueness of his skin was all but invisible.

“Good to see you, Lkani,” Dale Jonston said. “This weird weather of yours has just about got me down—you almost scared me to death creeping up on me like that! Don’t you ever make any noise?”

“Perhaps you should tie a bell around my neck,” the native suggested. “Is not that what you do to keep track of the animals on your planet?”

“Your sense of humor can. be a trifle… startling, Lkani.”

Dale Jonston eyed the native thoughtfully. These people never ceased to surprise him, and he had been stationed on Rohan for two years now. The planet was referred to officially as Procyon Twelve, of course, but no one who had ever been there called it by that colorless name. When in Rome—

“It is coming,” Lkani said quietly, pointing out into the gathering darkness. “My people have all gone from the Changing Lands—they are waiting in the hills. They will not have to wait long.”

Dale Jonston felt his jumpy nerves begin to settle down. He shouldn’t let it get him this way, he realized. But this brooding weather did something to a man. It was like waiting for a bad hurricane back on Earth, when you sat around interminably in the still air and watched the barometer fall. It had been like this for weeks now.

And there were the Others—the people of mystery that no man had ever seen, custodians of a civilization that spanned the far-flung stars. Somehow, in the mutter of the thunder and the clouds of darkness, he knew that they were near. Watching. Waiting—

“You know we’d be glad to have you on the Post,” he said. “We’ve got room for fifteen or twenty, and our buildings may be able to take what’s coming better than your settlement in the hills.”

“I will stay with my people,” Lkani said. “We have been through the Terror before—you have not.”

“You’ve got a point there at that.”

The motionless, dead-smelling air pressed down on them heavily. The yellow squares of light in the windows of the Post buildings looked safe and comfortable. Dale Jonston was glad that they were there.

“You had better get inside before it comes,” Lkani said.

“I guess I’ll have time for that, anyway,” Jonston replied.

“It comes fast,” Lkani smiled.

“Well, if we can be of any help to you just whistle or beat on a drum or something.”

“If we can help you just flash us a radio signal or send up a magnite flare,” Lkani countered.

“You win,” Dale Jonston laughed. “Sometimes I wonder just who is kidding who around here.”

“Here it comes,” said Lkani.

The charged air trembled and thunder blasted savagely across the plains. Great livid bolts of lightning slashed jaggedly down and tore at the crouching vegetation. The sound swelled to a shuddering roar that pounded the ears with physical force.

“Merry Christmas to all,” Dale Jonston whispered dazedly. “And to all a—”

He never finished. He had a split-second’s warning as a fresh wet smell hurtled in from the plains and then it hit. Rain! Rain such as no man on Earth had ever imagined—rain that slammed down in a blinding torrent, rain that thundered and pounded and choked.

Ten years it had been pent up in a monstrous reservoir—and now the Gates of Hell were opened wide!

He felt his feet slipping out from under him and he coughed desperately as water clogged his lungs. The rain beat at him with a million wet hammers and he knew he was going down. The ground under him was already a sea of mud.

A strong arm came out of nowhere and supported him as he stumbled back toward shelter. He gasped and coughed and tried to wipe the blinding sky river out of his streaming eyes. He staggered into the main Post building and the door shut behind him. “Lkani!” he choked.

He was alone—Lkani was gone.

He leaned against the log wall, fighting to get his breath. The rain pounded down on the Post as if determined to rip it to shreds. Thunder roared as the gods went mad.

Quite suddenly, Dale Jonston was chillingly aware that he was a long, long way from home.

Dale Jonston paced up and down the floor of his office, puffing on his pipe and listening to the hammer of the rain on the roof. It never stopped, that rain—it ebbed and flowed with savage fury, but it never stopped. It made Earth’s mightiest cloudbursts seem like gentle drizzles and it went on forever.

“Sit down, Dale,” said Tom Troxel. “You’re making me nervous.”

“Sorry,” muttered Dale Jonston, seating himself behind his desk.

“It’s only rain,” Troxel offered.

“Sure—and the H-Bomb is only atoms.”

“Take it easy—you can’t stop the rain and there hasn’t been any trouble yet.”

“Yet—that’s the word I don’t like.”

“What can happen? So it rains for six months or a year—it won’t kill anybody.”

“Won’t it?”

There was a splitting hiss followed by a jarring blast of thunder. The rain droned on and it was cold in the room.

“I don’t follow you,” Troxel said.

Dale Jonston got to his feet again and walked over to the duraglass window. He stood there and watched the rain wash across the glass like tiny breakers. That was all there was to see—the rain and the darkness.

“Do you know what it’s like out there now?” he said quietly. “It’s been raining like this for three weeks now and no one knows for sure how long it will go on. Those lowlands have been saturated, drenched. They’re wild swamps now, filled with great white worms crawling up through the soft ground. The natives are all crowded together on the hilltops and the caves are roaring underground rivers. The natives call this the Time of the Terror and they’re not just coining phrases for the fun of it. There’s a reason—things happen.”

“You think the natives will act up?”

“No, they’re intelligent people and they’re better adapted to these conditions than we are. I’m not much worried about the natives.”

“Then—”

“You know man’s greatest enemy is not alien natives, not monsters, not the Others—but himself. Man is his own destroyer. He always has been, down through history back on Earth, out in space when he got to the planets of his own solar system, and now here. He won’t change just because he’s on a planet that belongs to another sun.”

The rain thundered down and a cold wind whined around the little buildings of the Post. The light on Jonston’s desk threw blurred shadows on the log walls. Troxel shivered and lit a cigarette.

“Yes,” Jonston went on, puffing slowly on his pipe. “I’m worried about us—us, the mighty Earthmen. I tell you, you take any group of selected spacemen, men who have been carefully conditioned and psychologically screened—you take ’em and coop them up somewhere for a year. Put pressure on them; don’t let them see a living person except themselves. They may come through O. K.—and they may not. And we’re not dealing with trained spacemen here, Tom. Intelligent workers, sure, but not trained spacemen.”

“I’m receiving you.”

“Take any two ordinary people—good friends, maybe—and lock them in a room for a year. Watch what happens; the growing tensions, the little arguments, the brooding hostility that develops. Multiply that by a hundred or so, toss in this infernal rain and a planet light-years away from home, complicate the situation with great worms and God only knows what else, add a few natives—”

“And don’t forget the Others,” Troxel added with a grin.

“I’m not forgetting them—not for a minute. They’re an unknown factor, and hence doubly dangerous. Tom, I wish you were in charge of this Post. I’d sit around with a fiendish leer on my face and concoct enough gruesome situations to make your hair stand up on end and sing the ‘Deep Space Blues’.”

“I hear the swamp is full of dinosaurs, too.”

Dale Jonston looked at his prematurely bald junior officer and gave up. He was glad he had a man like Troxel around. It took a lot to panic a man with a sense of humor, and Troxel was no fool. Jonston realized that Troxel was deliberately forcing him to relax, and he appreciated it. He needed to calm down, and no mistake. It wouldn’t do for the commander of the Post to blow his top at a time like this.

He opened the bottom left-hand drawer of his plastic desk and took out a bottle and two glasses.

“We’ll see if we can conjure up a couple of pink elephants to add to your menagerie,” he said. “Have a drink.”

Troxel’s eyes brightened as he hitched his chair up to the desk.

“Hm-m-m—Old Rocket Fuel,” he enthused. “That’s what Admiral Groten was drinking just before he passed away, poor man. You know what his last words were?”

“Afraid not.”

“He said, ”I don’t see how they can make a profit on this stuff at twenty cents a fifth.”

“I told you that man was his own worst enemy,” Jonston said with a smile. “Jokes like that might well destroy civilization.”

“Right you are,” Troxel agreed cheerfully. “Let’s drink our first drink to the Others.”

Jonston raised his glass.

“To the Others,” he said quietly.

Outside, the great storm lashed out at the planet, churning the lowlands into swampy ooze and pelting the mountains with a driving deluge of rain. It was a chaos of thunder and lightning and wind. And, if you were of an imaginative turn of mind, you could hear, between the Post and the Hills of the Dead, the slithering of the great white worms…

It was night on Rohan and the Post was still. Dale Jonston sat alone at his desk, listening to the monotonous hammer of the rain on the roof. There was no visible difference between night and day, but you always knew, somehow, when night had come. You felt a strange chill in your blood and your mind did odd things with the shadows on the walls.

He permitted his tired body to relax. It had been a hard day; they were all hard. Conferences with psychologists and anthropologists—anthropologists were indispensable in space-travel, he reflected, since they were the only scientists on Earth who were trained to understand alien cultures—supervision of projected entertainments, paper work, and the thousand and one urgent little problems that were forever coming up in the management of any community. He fired up his pipe. Funny how much civilized man depended on tobacco…

He had held up pretty well, he figured. He had been keyed up to start with and had stayed more or less at the same pitch, while the rest of the Post had grown progressively more tense as the weeks and the months dragged by. Even Troxel was showing it now—there was a report on his desk from Dr. Moreland that noted the chief psychologist’s concern over Troxel’s condition.

All he could hear in the night silence of the Post was the sound of the thunder, the rain, and the wind—all scrambled together into a roaring awareness of the storm that never stopped. The lightning teamed up with his desk lamp to throw grotesque shadows on the log walls.

Sometimes, the distance got you. You wouldn’t think about it for days; you might even kid yourself into thinking that you had it licked, that you were conditioned to the deeps of space. Then it would hit you—if the great double star of Procyon should happen to explode, it would take over eleven years for the light of the explosion to reach the Earth. That’s a long way to be from home—a long way from the green fields and the trout streams and the girl you hoped would be waiting…

He sat back in his chair, puffing slowly on his pipe, eyes closed. You could never explain a planet like Rohan to the people back on Earth; it was one of those places that only the spacemen would ever know. You might show them pictures, talk to them. You could tell them that Rohan was a world where everything was adapted to a peculiar, seasonal rain cycle. Due to the pull of the double star, an odd inclination of the planet’s axis, and great quantities of the spongelike substance frondal in the upper atmosphere, it only rained once every ten years—and then it really rained.

You could tell them of the wonderful storage roots of the plant life, and of how they cast off millions of globular seeds just before the storm. The plants were largely destroyed by the pelting rain, but the seeds floated in the black muck and germinated after the storm.

You might describe the intelligent, blue-skinned natives of Rohan, and tell how deceptive their simple culture was from an anthropological point of view. Their economy was a standard hunting-and-gathering one, and they lived in small groups on the great plains. When the rains came, they retreated to the hilltops, where the unusual crowding and emotional tensions brought about the periodic Time of the Terror. They lived then from storage bins and small mammals which took refuge with them on the high ground and fish in the few caves which were not transformed into torrential underground rivers.

You could tell them about how the great plains turned into abysmal swamps filled with the crawling white worms that had been dormant underground during the dry season. You could tell them all about everything—except what counted. You couldn’t tell them how it felt.

Dale Jonston nodded sleepily, too tired to go to his room.

Men flamed up from the Earth and fought their way to the stars for many reasons—ambition, greed, glory. But there was only one thing that kept them on a planet once they had reached it—and that was a composite reason of economics. It might not always be so but now, in the infancy of interstellar travel, that was how it was working out.

The planet had to produce. So it was with Rohan, a planet rich in mineral substances and medicinal plants nowhere else available. The Proclamation of Equal Rights for All Intelligent Life had nipped exploitation in the bud, to man’s everlasting credit. Trade was carried on pretty much on a mutual-benefit basis, within the limits of human failings and the alien psychologies and cultures found on the far-flung worlds. The natives of Rohan were indifferent; they had their culture and were perfectly content to let the men from Earth have theirs. Earth had nothing to offer them except terrestrial civilization, and Dale Jonston often considered that to be at best a dubious blessing. He thought of Lkani, with his shrewd intelligence and quick humor. Lkani was by no stretch of the imagination an “inferior being”—indeed, Dale Jonston sometimes wondered just which race was tolerating which on Rohan…

The storm roared on, tearing at the building. The rain poured down until you couldn’t remember a time when the sun had shone and the sky had been any other color than black. The men were getting sick of the sight of each other. They laughed too much and too loud. You’d be sitting around and all of a sudden get an almost uncontrollable urge to sock somebody—anybody.

And then you would remember that you were a man, and that the Others were watching.

The Others. Who were they, what did they want? No man had ever seen them, but they were there—there in the vastnesses of space, waiting, watching. They were there in strange contacts on radar screens, there in alien artifacts found on distant worlds, there in the whispered legends that a thousand thousand primitive tribes whispered around their campfires in the sky.

It was rather painfully obvious that man, despite his once self-centered assumptions, was not the only intelligent race in the galaxy. He was out to carry his civilization to the stars—and someone was already there! Somewhere, sometime, they must meet. And then—what?

The best minds on Earth had wrestled with the problem and had come up with a few simple propositions which were unusual only in that they began to show the common sense of man’s maturity. One, there was already in existence a galactic civilization of a high order. Two, Earth could not hope to fight it—it must join it. Three, the men from Earth must first prove that they had finally grown up before they could expect any overtures from the Others.

Always, down the black rocket trails between the stars, men could feel their presence. Somewhere, lost in infinity, the Others watched and judged.

Dale Jonston got wearily to his feet and switched out the light. He walked slowly through the long halls to his room, nodding at the sentries as he passed them. The rain beat down with a terrible relentlessness and lightning hissed down on the swamps.

Here he was, he thought—one tiny man in this outpost on the edge of forever. And something big was going to happen; he knew it positively with that subconscious sixth sense that made him a leader. Something big—something that might well change the whole future history of that strange species that the universe called man.

It seemed as though he had hardly dropped off to sleep when Dale Jonston came to his senses with a start. He sat up in bed, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. The storm sounded wet and unpleasant outside and he was glad that he had the warmth of the Post to protect him. He glanced at the glowing dial of his watch. Four in the morning. What in the world—

Then it came again, whining dismally through the night. The alarm siren!

He leaped out of bed and pulled on his uniform, his mind spinning with half-formed conjectures. He ran out of his room into the hall. Lights were coming on all over the Post.

“What’s up?” panted Lin Carlson, catching up to him in the corridor.

“Don’t know—come on.”

Carlson—chief anthropologist at the Post—nodded and they pounded down the hall to Jonston’s office. The siren was wailing like a lost soul. Jonston flipped on the telecom.

“Hello, Control,” he said tensely. “Get me the Watchtower and stand by.”

The steady, relaxed face of the defense co-ordinator flashed on the screen.

“O.K. Williams—Jonston here. Let’s have it.”

“Over at the main gate, sir. Two sentries knifed—don’t know what the deal is yet but I figured I’d better turn in the alarm. I’ve already told Control to call a red alert.”

“Check. Anything else?”

“That’s about it—too early to tell what happened. Can’t get a thing on the radar. Should I turn the floodlights on?”

“I’ll handle it, Williams. Stand by. Over.”

Jonston jiggled the telecom switch.

“Hello, Control. See that the floodlights are turned on and get hold of Lieutenant Burks—I want an immediate personnel check. Tell the radio room to try to get through to Earth. Tell Burks I’ll expect a report here in half an hour—Carlson is here with me. That’s all.”

He switched off and turned to Carlson.

“Any ideas, Lin? Natives?”

Carlson shook his head and finished buttoning up his ETS shirt. “Don’t think so. Of course, I can’t tell for sure—but I’d bet a considerable fortune if I had one that those natives are safe. I’ve studied them for years—it’s unthinkable.”

“That’s my opinion too, frankly. But we can’t take chances with that atomic pile in here.”

“The Others, maybe?”

“They’re still an X factor, Lin—there’s no way to tell. Where the devil is Troxel?”

“Still pounding his ear probably. He could sleep right straight through Armageddon.”

Jonston drummed his fingers on his desk and thought of Dr. Moreland’s psychological report on Troxel. It couldn’t be, of course. Still—

“Let’s get down there to the main gate and see what goes,” he said.

Carlson nodded and they hurried through the Post together. Jonston noted that all the men were properly deployed and that there was no panic—yet.

The sentry house at the main gate was connected to the rest of the Post by a log tunnel. The gate was simply a door in the palisade wall, and the sentry house was a lonely place indeed during the Time of the Terror; visitors from across the swamps were few and far between.

They went down the tunnel and the storm was very close. The logs were moist and cold. Five armed men greeted them in the sentry house. Their faces were pale. The two bodies on the floor were covered with uniform coats. Jonston looked them over.

“Knife wounds all right,” he said slowly. “In the back.”

“It’s Marks and Richards, sir,” one of the men said needlessly. His voice was taut. “They… they—”

“They came a long way to die,” Jonston finished softly. “All quiet out here now?”

“Yes sir.”

“Take it easy, then—but keep your eyes open.”

He turned away, beckoning to Carlson, and they made their way back to his office. Lieutenant Burks was waiting for them.

“What did you find, Burks?”

“All present and accounted for, sir, as far as I can tell. Except—”

“Yes?”

“I can’t locate either Lieutenant Troxel or Dr. Moreland, sir. I thought perhaps that you’d seen them somewhere.”

“No,” Jonston said slowly. “No, I haven’t seen them.”

He sat down behind his desk and began to fill his pipe. The thunder and the rain seemed to isolate the little room, as though it were all by itself, drifting in infinity. He felt an awful chill race through his veins. Two men knifed in the back and—“They’ll show up, Dale,” Carlson said.

Dale Jonston hoped so with every atom of his being. If only Troxel would come barging in, with his smile and one of his countless jokes about the weather. He could see him, in his mind’s eye, sprawled in his chair, saying seriously, “It’s like I always say, Dale. Everybody talks about Mark Twain but nobody does anything about him—”

His thoughts came to an abrupt end as the door banged open. A wet, bedraggled caricature of a man stumbled into the room, his clothes soaked with mud. It was Dr. Moreland.

“I tried to stop him,” Moreland choked. “I tried to stop him.”

Carlson and Burks helped the psychologist to a chair. His eyes were bright and he was breathing with difficulty. Jonston went around and stood by his side, one hand on his rain-drenched shoulder.

“Try to tell us what happened, Doc,” he said.

“It was Troxel,” Dr. Moreland whispered, taking a deep breath. “I was worried about his psych report and went around to check on him. And… and—”

Carlson handed him a drink. Moreland gulped it gratefully.

“Go on,” Jonston said.

“He wasn’t in his room. I found him right after he knifed the sentries—he went out the main gate into the storm. I… I tried to follow him, catch him, but… the storm—”

“I understand,” Jonston said, a sick feeling in his heart. “Did he have anything with him—any weapons?”

“I… I think he was carrying something. I tried to get him but the swamp—Dale, it’s… it’s horrible out there—”

Jonston listened to the hammer of the rain on the roof. The lightning hissed down on the swamps and the thunder rolled heavily through the black skies. He could feel the cold sweat on his forehead.

“There’s just one thing to do,” he said. “We’ve got to go out there and get him.”

Dale Jonston tried not to think of Troxel as his friend. He was just a factor in a problem that had to be solved. That wasn’t an easy way to look at it, hut it was the only way. He knew that Troxel, as junior officer at the Post, had access to the arsenal. There were atomic bombs in the arsenal—and when there’s a madman at your door with an atom bomb it’s already later than you think.

Copters were useless in the storm that raged across the face of the planet, and the ship from Earth wasn’t due for another two months. Dale Jonston smiled without humor. It was strictly a family affair.

“We’ll never find him out there,” Lin Carlson said. “Never in a million years.”

“We’ve got to find him.”

“A man might live for a while in that storm,” Carlson pointed out. “But he could never locate anyone else—he couldn’t see two feet in front of him. And if the person being hunted doesn’t want to be found—”

“I’ll find him,” Jonston said.

“You? You can’t go out there—you’re in charge here.”

“That’s why I’m going.”

“Don’t throw your life away, Dale,” Carlson said. “It’s all very well to be a hero, but what good will it do? You’ll go out there into that swamp full of worms and we’ll all be worse off than we are now.”

Jonston smiled. “Don’t worry, Lin. I’m not going to throw a fit of heroics for dear old Terra—I think as much of my hide as the next man. I think I can find Troxel or I wouldn’t go. You see, I’m not going alone.!”

“I don’t get it.”

“Very simple, really—Lkani. He can cross those swamps and he must have some way to see where he’s going. If he’ll help us—”

“I think you’re making a grave mistake,” Dr. Moreland said, shaking his head. “To put the safety of this Post into the hands of a savage—after all—”

“Lkani is not a savage,” Carlson interrupted angrily. “A man of your education, Dr. Moreland, should certainly have better sense than to—”

“Knock it off,” Jonston said wearily. “This is hardly the time for an argument.”

He looked at the lines of tension in Carlson’s face and at Dr. Moreland’s too-bright eyes. He felt the strain himself—it was like sitting on a powder keg while a paranoiac looked at the fuse and played with a cigarette lighter. There was no longer any time for discussion. He had to act.

“O.K., Burks,” he said. “Start firing magnite flares across the Hills of the Dead where Lkani and his people are. Get with it.”

Burks left and Jonston settled back and tried to relax.

“What do we do now?” Carlson asked.

“Cross your fingers, friend. That’s all—just cross your fingers.”

The storm lashed at the Post with new fury as if challenging any man to go against it in mortal combat. Jonston thought of Tom Troxel out there, sick and dangerous. This is the price you pay, his mind whispered. This is the price you pay for your ticket to the edge of forever.

The hours passed. The faces of the men were white with strain. Any minute, any second, the blast could come. And they could only sit and wait. And wait. And wait.

The telecom buzzed.

“Jonston here.”

“It’s the native chief, sir—Lkani. He’s at the main gate. He says—”

“Never mind what he says. See that he’s comfortable—I’ll be right down.”

He flipped off the telecom and got to his feet.

“Can’t I go along?” Carlson asked. “Maybe I—”

“Thanks, Lin—but if one man can’t do this job then two men or a dozen can’t do it either. You hold the fort.”

“Well—good luck.”

“I still think—” Dr. Moreland began, then thought better of it.,

Dale Jonston, already dressed in boots and plastic slicker, hurried out of his office and down the tunnel to the main gate. The rain pounded gleefully on the roof, sensing a victim. Lightning burned furiously through the storm. Jonston shivered. If they couldn’t find Troxel—

Lkani was there waiting for him. His blue face was glistening wet in the cold light of the sentry house.

“I saw your flares,” he said.

“You don’t know how glad I am to see you, friend,” Jonston said. “We’re in a mess.”

He explained the situation to the native, wasting no time. Lkani listened carefully, nodding his head from time to time. The storm howled mournfully around the log house and the rain came down in torrents.

“I understand,” he said finally. “I will try to help you, of course—but it will not be easy.”

“If you ever want a medal, Lkani, I’ll get you a dozen or so.”

“I’m afraid they would be of little use to me,” Lkani smiled. “Are you ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Then let’s go.”

Two of the sentries opened the gate and a wet hell blasted in. Dale Jonston’s heart hammered in his throat. He looked at Lkani and tried to smile. This, emphatically, was it.

Shoulder to shoulder, the two men walked out into chaos.

The thick mud sucked at his feet and the rain pounded his body. Dale Jonston’s skin crawled under the cold lashing of the wind and he noticed wildly that the rain smelled like metal. Like standing under Niagara in a raincoat, he thought numbly.

He couldn’t see; he plodded on in a nightmare fantasy of unreality. He was afraid and his stomach felt hollow and cold. He held closely to Lkani’s arm and forced himself to keep going. Where? Somewhere—anywhere that Lkani went. Through the storm, through the sea of rain, through the darkness.

The rain choked in his lungs. He couldn’t think but his mind was spinning with livid images. And questions—questions that screamed in his head, questions that had no answers. How could any man, sane or not, stay alive in this shrieking attack of the elements? How long could he take it? How could Lkani find his way through the swamp—how could he know where he was going, much less how to get there?

A man might live for a while in that storm, Carlson had said. But he could never locate anyone else.

Jonston gasped for breath and pulled his feet through the muck.

Lightning sizzled through the wet air and hissed into the swamp behind them. The thunder crashed with an ear-splitting roar. It was too much for any man to take—but Jonston kept his head down and went on. There was no other way to go.

His mind began to think about the thousands of slithering white worms that undulated through the swamp and terror crept like ice through his veins. His feet were tense and uncertain in the mud, as though he were walking through the ocean surf back on Earth with Jellyfish between his toes.

Lkani stopped.

“What’s the matter?” Jonston yelled above the pounding of the storm.

Lkani pointed and Jonston followed his arm. There was something in the muck, something dark. Jonston knelt against the force of the rain and rolled it over.

Troxel. Troxel—with his neck cut almost in half by a knife.

Dale Jonston got numbly to his feet and stood there swaying in the blast of the storm.

“Tom,” he whispered.

That was all. There was no time for anything else. He had to whip his mind into action, had to think. Lkani was silent in the wind-driven downpour, waiting. Jonston clenched his fists. THINK. The rain hammered at his face.

Troxel was dead in the swamp, knifed. He hadn’t killed himself, that was obvious. In all probability, he hadn’t killed the sentries, either. Troxel wasn’t the man they were after. O.K. Someone had cracked, and it hadn’t been Troxel. Who, then?

Jonston thought back. He shook his head, half in anger and half in fear. He had been tricked, neatly and completely. Feinted out of position like the greenest cadet.

“Dr. Moreland,” he breathed.

Of course. It was Dr. Moreland who had made out the psych report on Troxel, Dr. Moreland who had “seen” Troxel knife the sentries, Dr. Moreland who had come in wet from the swamp, Dr. Moreland who had been afraid to call in Lkani.

And he was inside the Post and he outranked every other officer.

Dale Jonston looked down at the thing that had been his friend and made himself think the problem through. He ignored the thunder that blasted through the darkness, ignored the choking rain, ignored the cold wind that whistled through his slicker. Think—

Dr. Moreland had cracked under the strain of the storm and too many tense mental problems of others. He wasn’t a villain; he was sick. But he had to be stopped. He had tricked Jonston out of the Post and he had killed three men with a knife. He couldn’t go on like that, Jonston realized. He would either have to stop killing altogether, which wouldn’t be likely, or—

Or he would have to destroy the entire Post, himself included. How could he do that? There were atomic bombs in the arsenal—but Jonston doubted that Dr. Moreland could get into the arsenal alone. Even though he outranked the other officers, he was a psychologist and would have no business in the arsenal. The other men were not fools; they would become suspicious and that wouldn’t do. What else then? Jonston shivered. The atomic pile, used to power the mining tools. There would be guards in the arsenal, or supply men at least, because they were on the alert for an attack from without. But the atomic pile—Moreland could get to it—could tamper with it.

No man in his right mind would alter the pile, of course. But that was just the point. Moreland was no longer sane.

Dale Jonston could visualize the scene—Moreland in the room with the pile, warning the others that they must not approach him. Yes, Moreland would have to let them know what he had done—have to taunt them with his cleverness and feel like God with the power in his hands. A working knowledge of psychology was not by any means restricted to the psychologists in the Extra Terrestrial Service—it was standard equipment.

Lightning hissed into the swamp again and the rain slammed down harder with the push of the thunder. Jonston smiled coldly. All right, genius, he thought. You’ve figured out what you should have known all along—now what are you going to do about it?

He put his mouth next to Lkani’s ear and hollered above the storm. If this didn’t work—

“Lkani, Moreland’s going to detonate the pile. It will destroy your people as well as mine. What can we do?”

Lkani was tall and dark in the driving rain. His steady eyes measured Jonston carefully.

“Just think the facts of the situation,” a voice spoke clearly in Jonston’s stunned brain. “Then follow me.”

Dale Jonston stood there staring.

So, his mind whispered, he can read minds, too.

The storm lashed out at them with sentient fury and the darkness covered the two men like a shroud.

No matter what men say, and no matter how good an act they may put on for the world, there is within all men a pragmatic core that always knows what the true score is. And within that core, despite their outward egotism, men usually underestimate themselves. Dale Jonston would never have believed for a minute that he could take what he was taking and go on asking for more. But he could—and he did.

He didn’t think about it. He just kept plodding forward, holding on to Lkani’s arm and pulling first one foot and then the other out of the eternal mud. The rain beat at him and the wind tore at his clothes. He felt as though his lungs were on fire and his eyes burned in his skull.

Every second he expected the blinding flash from the Post—the flash and the end.

But they were moving away from the Post, he sensed. Toward the Hills of the Dead. He shuddered, feeling the unthinkable coils of the great white worms slither past them in the darkness. Why didn’t they attack? There was just one answer—Lkani. Lkani was the answer to a lot of questions.

The footing became a little surer under them as the clinging muck turned into firmer stuff. Jonston realized that they would never have got through at all if Lkani had not known how to avoid the bottomless pits and suckholes that must have made up the greater part of the swamp. That Moreland had gone as far as he had was a miracle of a singularly unwelcome variety.

They were climbing now, he knew. Climbing into the Hills of the Dead where the natives buried their lifeless friends and the wind whistled through the mountains. Torrents of rain water gushed in mighty rivers down the hillsides and lightning hissed in the sky. Jonston held on.

Suddenly, it was over. They were out of it and Dale Jonston could only stand numbly and wait for feeling to return to his battered body. He stood there, soaked to the skin, and looked out at the raging storm. Gradually, he became aware of the fact that he was in a cave. Someone put a bowl of hot liquid in his cold hands and he drank it mechanically.

Lkani thought ahead and they were waiting.

The fluid was strong and warm and good, like a cross between a heavy soup and a sweet liquor. It picked him up amazingly and he began to feel almost human again.

“We haven’t much time,” Lkani said.

“I’m O.K.—let’s go.”

They started into the cave and Dale Jonston noted with surprise that the air was dry and warm. There must be some sort of a force field across the cave entrance, he reasoned. Simple natives indeed! And yet the smooth floor of the cave seemed to be completely free from mechanical contrivances of any sort; the blue-skinned people cooked over roaring wood fires and evidently made their homes in smaller, branching caves. Force fields and caves, mind reading and a primitive social structure—Dale Jonston shook his head at the mounting paradoxes.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Can’t explain,” Lkani answered shortly. “Trying to keep the man from pulling the rods on that pile.”

Coercive thought projection, Jonston’s mind observed.

He followed Lkani without comment through the cave. The sounds of the storm were muted by distance now, but far ahead of him he could hear the muffled roar of a swollen underground river. He tried not to think of Moreland at the Post—face too pale, eyes too bright, with his finger on the trigger of eternity. If that pile cut loose—

It was all up to Lkani now. Dale Jonston accepted the situation as it was, without trying to assert a meaningless authority of his own. He knew superior intelligence when he saw it and he was ready to cooperate. He followed the native tensely and kept his eyes open. Lkani, he noticed, had picked up a tubular device of some sort that looked like an uncommonly thick flashlight with a pistol grip attached.

Primitive man, Jonston thought, laughing at himself.

The sound of the river was closer now and they quickened their steps. Why are we going alone? Jonston wondered. Why don’t the rest of them come with us? A part of his mind sensed the truth: I’ve got to be the one who does the job. Lkani will make it possible, but I’ve got to do it. Why?

They passed a branching cave that was larger than the others and Jonston looked inside. It was brightly lighted from within and he caught a fleeting glimpse of a slim tower of silver that strained toward the dark heavens above.

A spaceship—in a cave!

Lkani went on and Jonston stayed right behind him. Abruptly, the air turned cold and moist; there was no gradation from warm to cold—it was just suddenly and precisely cold. There was still light in the cave, coming from a faint mineral glow in the rocks.

Jonston shivered and kept on going, his mind beginning to stagger under the strange import of the things that he had seen. The churning roar of the river washed chillingly through the damp cave and phantom echoes shuddered among the rocks.

Time, he knew, was running out.

The river hissed by like a great serpent below them, fat and swollen with tons of rain and hurling itself angrily at the walls of its rock prison. Dale Jonston stood with Lkani and looked uneasily at the narrow ledge of sharp rock that wound along above the boiling torrent.

“That the way?” he asked, knowing the answer in advance.

Lkani nodded and swung down to the ledge, holding carefully to the metal tube. Jonston trembled in his wet clothes and followed him

“You’ve got me all wrong, friend,” he panted, “I’m an ETS man—not the Human Fly.”

Lkani smiled and kept on going. Jonston took a deep breath and tried to cling to the slippery rocks. The churning river tumbled wickedly below them, filling the cavern with booming spray. He was cold and afraid and he felt very small. He tried to joke to himself, as men always do when they feel death at their throat. But nothing is very funny when you’re walking the Last Mile.

Time ceased to be as they clawed and fought their way along the treacherous ledge. Their fingers were cut and bleeding and their exhausted muscles were numb with fatigue. The world was the next rock, the next curve, the next inch. Below them, the black river chanted its song of hate—and waited.

Jonston gasped with relief as Lkani turned off into a cave that branched away from the river. He stood gratefully still for a long minute, getting his wind and listening to the roar of the cheated torrent. His chest ached with strain and his torn clothes were streaked with blood where he had touched them with his hands.

“Come on,” Lkani said.

They ran through the comparatively dry cave, forcing their bodies as if they were something apart from them, like automatons in which their minds temporarily resided. Lkani still carried the tube in his hand and he set a murderous pace. Jonston kept up with difficulty, breathing in short, painful jerks of air. His mind was a spotty screen of black and white upon which Moreland’s face was stamped in livid flame. Time—there couldn’t be any more time.

Lkani stopped, his chest heaving. He stood rigidly with his eyes closed. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. Jonston watched silently, fighting to get his breath. The great river was a dark murmur behind them.

“All right,” Lkani whispered. “We’re directly under the pile room, and he’s up there. I’ll open a hole and you get him—and don’t miss.”

Jonston set himself, his heart beating wildly. Lkani aimed the metal tube at an angle toward the upper part of the cave wall. He set two dials very carefully and pressed the switch.

There wasn’t a sound—but a spherical section of rock ceased to be. It simply wasn’t there any more. Dale Jonston hurled himself into the hole and hoisted himself through.

The scene that confronted him was like a picture that he had seen many times before. He had imagined it so intensely that every detail was familiar to him. The indicators set in the lead shield were gyrating feverishly and the very air in the glaringly white room was tensely charged. Moreland crouched at the door, his too bright eyes staring out of his too white face.

He screamed when he saw Jonston and threw himself crazily at the lead shield, clawing for the damping rods. Jonston caught him with a flying tackle—and Moreland exploded like a wild thing in his arms. He shrieked and tore and lashed out with superhuman strength. Something hit Jonston on the side of the head and white lights danced in his brain.

Jonston wrenched loose somehow and fell to the floor. He rolled and got up again, sick and dizzy. Moreland was rushing in, screaming his hate, his fingers tensed like white claws. Jonston backed away, calling on reserves of power he wasn’t sure he possessed.

One punch, he thought desperately. One punch is all I’ve got.

Moreland loomed up in front of him and Jonston threw his punch from the heels up. It smacked into Moreland’s face with a sickening crunch. The shock of the blow traveled back through Jonston’s arms and went off with a white puff in his brain.

That was the last thing he remembered.

“You’ve been out for thirty-six hours,” Lin Carlson said.

Dale Jonston looked around shakily. He was in his own bed in the Post and his body ached dully. The light from the floor lamp splashed whitely across Lin Carlson’s face.

“Lkani,” he said, not recognizing his own voice. “Where’s Lkani?”

“He went back across the swamp after he unlocked the door of the pile room—that tunnel the natives dug caved in.”

“I see,” Jonston said, not seeing at all. Tunnel caved in? That was nonsense—

“Sure glad to see you awake again,” Carlson smiled. “You really saved our necks, Dale. If you hadn’t fixed those damping rods, we’d all be in the unhappy hunting ground for sure.”

I never touched those rods, Jonston thought.

“The credit belongs to Lkani,” he said.

“He’s some native, I’ll say.”

“Yeah—some native.”

“He left a note for you,” Carlson said, handing him a sealed envelope. “And we’ve got Moreland doped to the gills—we’ll send him back on the first ship to Earth. Maybe they can do something for him.”

“Everything else O.K.?”

“Guess so—except that none of us quite understands what happened. Lkani didn’t do much explaining and—”

“Tell you all about it some day, Lin. Right now, I wonder if you’d go tell the cook to scare up some breakfast for me? I’m half starved.”

“Will do,” Carlson said, getting to his feet. “See you later.”

He left the room and Dale Jonston was alone. He twisted his bruised body over in the bed and tore open the letter. His hands, he noticed, were shaking. There were two sentences on the paper:

“There was no atomic explosion—that is what counts. Stop and think and you will understand.”

Dale Jonston fumbled for his pipe, filled it with fragrant tobacco, and lit it. He closed his eyes and relaxed, inhaling the smoke slowly. Lkani, he sensed instantly, had somehow planted a message in his brain. Or perhaps he was in contact now from across the swamp—

No matter. It came softly into his mind—softly but with bell-like clearness.

You are an intelligent man, the voice spoke in his mind. You cannot see two and two and fail to put them together to make four. We have gambled on your intelligence and your discretion—and we know that you will act accordingly, both for our people and for your own.

You saw force fields and spaceships, telepathy and a tool that realigns the dimensional plane of atoms. You must have guessed that we are a part of that civilisation which you know only as the Others. Much that may seem mysterious to you is not strange at all; like so many things, it is relatively simple once you know the facts.

You have had difficulty in associating what appears to be a primitive culture with an advanced civilization, but that is only because you have confused complexity with progress. Your own anthropologists have known for many years that simple cultures are often better integrated than your own, and better serve the needs of the individual. It has been a truism of your people that you have knowledge and refuse to apply it.

If you will stop and think about it, the “Time of the Terror” is quite as graphic a term as “A Psychological State of Tension Induced by Periodic Storms”—but I will not trouble you with an analysis of why we live as we do. We are happy and that, after all, is the only valid test.

We are but a tiny part of a tremendous civilization that spans the galaxy. Cultural maturity must be attained before a people can become a part of such an association—and there are many different types of civilizations involved. For example, we do not manufacture our own spaceships; our contributions are along other lines.

We have been watching Earth for centuries, waiting. Your presence here on Rohan is not entirely your own doing—it is one of a series of tests. You see the problem: a tense conflict situation with atomic energy readily available. There was no atomic catastrophe—and it was prevented by your own efforts. You asked for help and got it—and that, too, showed intelligence on your part.

You will understand, Dale Jonston, why this knowledge must stop with you. Your people are not yet ready to face the situation that exists, and unless they work their problems out for themselves they can never attain the stability that is essential for galactic co-operation. But the time is rapidly approaching—and you will live to see the day when mankind sets forth on an adventure beyond its wildest dreams.

For we are not the only civilisation in the universe.

That was all.

Dale Jonston opened his eyes. His pipe had gone out and he put it aside. It was too much to assimilate all at once. He looked around his room. The floor lamp threw dark shadows on the log walls. He thrilled with knowledge.

Not the only civilization in the universe—

Beyond the Others—what?

He shook his head, suddenly conscious of a strangeness in the air.

Something was wrong.

He got out of bed and stood still, listening. There wasn’t a sound. That was it. Silence.

He walked shakily over to the window and pressed the button that changed the glass from opaque to clear. Mottled sunlight splashed into the room. He looked up into the sky where the massed black clouds were splitting and being forced apart by slanting rays of flame that transformed the sky into a brilliant mass of color—red and yellow and green, cold silver and warm gold, the clouds rolled by and the light came through. He opened the window and drank in the fresh, clean smell of the breeze that murmured in from the marshes.

It had been a tough climb up from Earth to the edge of forever, he thought—but it was a climb that had to be made.

He heard laughter drift up from around the Post and somewhere a guitar began to play. A rhythmic voice started an old, old song:

“Oh, I’m bound to go where there ain’t no snow,

Where the sleet don’t fall and the wind don’t blow,

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains—”

Dale Jonston smiled happily.

“There’s a lake of stew and of whisky, too,

You can paddle all around in a big canoe,

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains—”

The storm was over.

The End.