The great rock lizard heaved slowly up, and for a moment the huge head swung from side to side as the remaining eye opened. He was waiting for that. Quickly he lifted the gun, pumping the slug deep into the center of the blood-red pupil.
The rock five feet from him was torn away with a great rasp as the gigantic clawed foot struck at him. He rolled violently to one side, scrambled to his feet and backed wearily away.
The rock cracked and groaned as the great bulk heaved itself up over the edge, and he turned and ran. But it ignored him. The great jaws clomping, the rock-horned tail writhing, it moved with ponderous haste diagonally across the slope, passing so near him that he saw the rock-ripple of its flanks. It became more visible to him for what it was as it lumbered away.
Blindly it rammed head on into a towering overhang of rock a quarter-mile away, scrabbling with the claws that could rend solid rock. The overhang was a good three hundred feet high. As John Logan watched, the rock wall wavered, then fell in slow, graceful majesty, millions of tons of solid rock, smashing down on the creature, the great rock slide rolling it over, hammering it down. He got a glimpse of it being flipped like a child’s toy, then it disappeared in the thundering river of rock, buried for all time.
A few remaining rocks crashed directly down among the timbers and the dust of the crushed stone lingered in the air. All was stillness.
The carbine clattered at his feet and he sank down, his head cradled in his arms, the sobs shaking him.
Just as the sun touched the bitter edge of the next mountain, he stood up, picked up the carbine and walked down toward the dark forest of pine.
As he walked, he carried his head high.
Once a man has met, and conquered, the final, unbelievable obscenity, the last lurking god of horror, throwback to ancient days when the world was young, there can be no more fear — ever again.
The darkness of the forest was a friendly Great.
Minion of Chaos
Originally published in Super Science Stories, September 1949.
Wisdom was his destiny — learn and conquer his creed... until in an atom-scarred universe there was but one being left to overcome — Man!
Chapter One
The Global Rat Trap
It was, he thought, very much like being a rat in a maze, with a very aseptic death around the next corner. The rat, being a rat, suspects the imminence of death, but can make no counter-offensive
It had been building for a long time. He felt it in the studied casualness of his fellow-workers, and in the new alertness of the hated monitor, Miss Ellen Morrit.
A nice clean life, they had said, You’ll be well-protected. The police won’t let the nasty people tear you to death. We hope.
He sighed, turned on the stool and looked back over his shoulder, seeing his name printed in reverse, showing through the translucent glass of the laboratory door. Peter Lucas.
He wondered where he had slipped. And he wondered whether the danger of slipping, the fatal effects of a slip, were coloring his judgment. Maybe Ellen Morrit wasn’t being quite so beady-eyed after all.
No, they were onto him the same way they would be onto any other defective bit of material.
Ellen Morrit sat on a high stool beside the laboratory table. She said dryly, “Through working for the day, Mr. Lucas?”
He looked at her, wondering for the thousandth time why they didn’t dress female employees of the Bureau of Improvement in a more becoming uniform. She was a white starched tube with a severe face at one end and slim ankles at the other. Nice hair, though, under a little gold cap.
“Why are you staring at me, Mr. Lucas?”
“For a reason that would horrify your factual little mind, sugar bun. How many years have we been sharing this cubicle?”
“Three years, four months and — and nine days,” she said firmly.
“Too long. What do you say we get married?”
She lifted her chin. She quoted from the manual, “ ‘All technical employees of the Bureau of Improvement are forbidden to marry because of the possibility of their aptitudes being to some degree hereditary characteristics.’ ”
“But they’ll let a colorless reactionary like you marry?”
She gave him one of her rare smiles; but her gray eyes didn’t smile at all. “As soon as my five years are up, Mr. Lucas.”
“May you be blessed with numerous ice-cream cones.”
He stood up, filled with the familiar dull anger, and walked over to the wide window. His lab was on the tenth floor of the Bureau of Improvement Building. He looked out across the expanse of grass, to the distant flight towers, the wide pastel expanse of the New City. It had a fairy-land look; the architects had been infatuated with tower and minaret.
Yet Peter felt himself drawn to some of the less decayed buildings in the dead city off to the left. A mound of rubble separated the two. In the New City there were cars, pedestrians, glittering shops, gay clothes and the best of music.
In the dead city were the hiding places of the unfit.
He felt her beside him and he defiantly pointed to the mouldering lines of a gray building in the old city, the dead city.
“They had the right idea, Morrit. Look at that. Functional and sweet and clean. They were headed in the right direction.”
She said thoughtfully, “That’s a curious statement, Mr. Lucas. You used the phrase ‘headed in the right direction.’ That is indicative of the basic flaw in your thinking. We do not ‘head’ in any direction. We’ve achieved a static, unified community, and we are satisfied.”
He laughed. “You mean you’re dead, Morrit. We’re on a big highway leading toward extinction. A nice flat, broad, smooth highway. We’ve forgotten an old rule — progress or perish.”
“That has been proven false, Mr. Lucas. You must know that. You must know that it is only through the very extreme liberalism of Chairman Ladu, that you are...”
“Permitted to exist at all? How nice of Emery!”
“Thirty years ago, Mr. Lucas, as soon as your aptitudes had been discovered through the use of the integrated tests you would have been painlessly... removed, probably at the age of twelve.”
“And you’re sorry we aren’t still on that basis.”
Her gray eyes widened in anger and she turned away. “I see no necessity for improvements,” she said. “Repair and control is all that is necessary.”
“If they’d turn me loose, baby, you’d really see some improvements.” Lucas gestured toward the tiny motor strewn on his bench. Assembled, it was no larger than a peach pit. “That turns out a quarter horse. But it’ll never be much better because the Code restricts us to minor variation within the approved method. On my own I’d try new methods, new procedures. I might get five horse out of it — or five hundred and then...”
“Be quiet!” she said, her lips thin and tight.
He smiled lazily as he went back to his chair. “I forgot, Morrit. Science is a nasty word. There is an approved list of beneficial devices. Radio, television, the internal combustion engine, electricity, subsonic aircraft, telephone, structural plastics, hydroponics. None of those things give you a fear reaction. But we leave the knowledge barrier of electronics right where it is. And we never, never, never mess with atomics any more. Or planetology, or rockets, or weather control. Never, never.”