GODS OF SPACE-9
672 Words
THE LITTLE CAVE WAS a weird, intense glare of violet light. Atwood had had no difficulty finding it; the glare streamed like an aura from its entrance, out into the night. The Xarite, almost in a pure state, lay in great powdery heaps. Atwood’s hands were trembling as he scooped it up, filling his insulated cylinder, clamping down its lid. More than ever, a desperate haste was upon him now. So many things might be transpiring back in the village. And he realized too that his spaceship might be discovered.
Within a minute or two he was into the cave and out again, with his precious little cylinder slung on his back. He was more skillful at leaping now. Ahead the circular barrage was complete now, a vertical violet curtain of light enclosing the village. It made the darkness out here on the rocks seem more intense by contrast.
The dim landscape swayed weirdly with his flat sailing leaps. And suddenly, off to one side, he was aware that round blobs of yellow glow were appearing. The monster genes. With the season of their growth upon them, they were struggling up out of their microscopic invisible world.
The night out here now was hideous with the throbbing, humming voices of the monsters. Atwood’s heart went cold. How would he get the girl out of this damnable place? He could think only that in some way he must quickly persuade her. Together, running, leaping like this—or like birds following the flimsy forest-top which the genes could not reach—he would be able to get her to the spaceship.
With the purple barrage curtain close before him, Atwood slowed up. Then he came within the direct light-radiance; crawling almost flat to pass between two of the braziers. The glare blinded him. Then he was through, rising to his feet.
“So? Here is the God—our Man-God who was gone?” It was Bohr’s ironic, guttural voice. Atwood had no chance to jump away. Bohr, with a ponderous pounce, gripped him with the power of a machine. Bohr and a dozen of his roistering men were here.
“Our Man-God is late for the ceremony,” Bohr was leering. They were shoving Atwood forward, along a village street crowded with jabbering Marlans, across an edge of the village toward an open space, like a public square. The mound-dwellings bounded it on one side, and the barrage was on the other. The square was thronged with Marlans, standing in jabbering groups, gazing toward the center where three platforms were erected. Two were side by side, and one faced them. The two were empty. On the other a single Marlan sat in a great cradle. The Ruler-Selah. His ponderous fat body was round with flesh. In the cradle he squatted like a huge toad.
Bohr’s grip never for an instant had relaxed on Atwood. “I am to be made a God now?” Atwood murmured.
“Yes. The Selah has decided.” Surely that was leering irony in Bohr’s heavy voice. Where was Ah-li? Then, as Atwood’s captors shoved him toward the larger and higher of the two empty platforms, Atwood saw the girl. Slowly she was crossing the square. Ah-li, robed now in a long flowing, bluish grass garment with a garland of flowers around her head. The Goddess Ah-li. The Marlans, awed, bowed before her as she advanced, mounted the smaller platform and stood with her arms outstretched. The reflected glow of the barrage painted her face. Apprehension was there. And then she saw Atwood. Relief swept her; and then an exaltation. The recognition of a Man-God, with her to guide these people.
Then Atwood, tense and alert, stood on the other platform, facing the ruler. He was some twenty feet from the girl, and five feet or so above her.
“The Man-God is here,” Bohr proclaimed in English. And then he seemed to be repeating it in the Marlan language.
The crowd was bowing now with foreheads to the ground. The Selah spoke in a piping, cracked voice; and with a gesture ordered Bohr from the platform.
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