He dropped down on a broken stave and sat inert. Slowly he forced himself to consider the meaning and implications of his plight.

Jean could not return, yet he had not entirely planned to return. He realized then that he had been thinking, in the back of his mind, of returning to the island, to the abode of peace, there to spend his life in the company of the semi-human dilwildi. The fear that had driven him away had abated over the subsequent weeks, but he had not acknowledged his plans even to himself.

Now he could not return to the island, nor could he return to the colony by water. The wood in the gig would not make a raft even if he could recover it all, and there were no trees here. Perhaps there were trees in the mountains that his map had shown to be several hundred kilometers to the west, but there was no way he could reach them, nor cut them down, nor return them to the lake. The bushes that grew during the melt were all but useless for wood.

He could not go by water and he could not remain where he was. Soon the melt would pass, and he would starve here. Without shovels he could not dig a permafrost cellar, nor could he hope to fill one while hunting alone. He would starve if he remained, nor did he wish to remain cut off from his fellows in such a desolate place. Solitude might have been acceptable amid the beauty of the island but not here.

He would follow the herds. There was no other hope.

For years the younger colonists had speculated whether the others lived nearby or followed the herds. Only a few would champion the latter position. It seemed absurd that anyone could survive constant migration, or that anyone could trek so many kilometers every year. Now Jean would get a chance to prove or disprove the theory. It was not a prospect that pleased him.

He searched through the wreckage of the gig, recovering his few belongings. These he bundled together and then he laid out the torn sail. It was too large to carry so he carefully cut out a sleeping robe from the best of it and then sat before a fire made of the pieces of his gig and made himself a fresh pair of moccasins from part of the remainder.

As he sat, he calculated that the melt moved at an average rate of thirty-five kilometers per day. He would be hard pressed to maintain that pace day after day, especially since he would also have to hunt and avoid being hunted at the same time.

He would not survive. Somewhere he would be too slow and a trihorn or longneck would get him. Or he would run out of ammunition. Or, worst of all and most likely, his leg would not let him keep up the pace and he would slowly fall behind the melt until low winter and starvation overtook him.

If so, so be it. His earlier shock had given way to a new fatalism. His one great adventure was ended and an even greater one had begun. It would be better to die thus than to have lived out a miserable life as a half-man in the colony. Yet he did not look forward to death as he had before, for it would be sweeter still to survive and return.

Night was about him and the fire was low. He had not slept the night before and now he must. He might die from sleeping, but there was no help for it. He put his finger through the trigger guard, his thumb on the hammer, and let go of consciousness. more tomorrow

Vapor slipped away from the fire after half an hour. By that time he knew everything that could be learned from it. The aroma of the meat told him that it was hump ox and the absence of caterwauling nearby told him that the stranger had sense enough to make camp far from the scene of his kill. He carried a muzzleloading rifle, but of a different design from those Vapor had seen before.

The other wore a full beard and shaggy hair, neither yet streaked with gray, though his face was lined with worry or some great sorrow, giving him the false appearance of age. He had been injured at some time in the past, for he unconsciously stroked his left thigh in the manner of one remembering some old pain.

His clothing was of fur, of course, but much more conservatively cut than that which Vapor’s people wore. Also it was quite heavy and the fire was high. Perhaps this one was ill or he was not inured to the climate or he did not know how to avoid the carnivores at night. Perhaps a combination of these factors existed.

Vapor was curious, but Grandaddy Longneck was getting too close for comfort. Vapor could smell the creature upwind of where he lay. It would not do to become careless while watching the stranger. He slipped away into the night.

By first light he was backtracking the stranger and soon he reached the humpox. Only bones and tattered hide remained. Vapor made a large circle about the site in order to get beyond the area which the carnivores had churned. There he found the stranger’s back trail again and followed it toward the lake.

Vapor was amazed at what he read in the mud.

The stranger was a cripple! His right footprint was uniformly deeper than his left and showed a dragging trail where he lurched each time his left foot was down. His left footprint was shallow and smudged where he twisted to thrust his good leg forward. That such a one should be here was incredible.

He soon observed the lurching gait for himself as he came up behind Jean making his way toward the lake. Vapor followed close behind, chafing at the slowness of their progress.

The stranger reached the bluff overlooking the lake and turned north, worked his way to the beach down a stream and turned north again. Vapor stayed on the embankment out of sight. Then he saw how the stranger had come and at the same time realized that he was about to get a new insight into his character.

He had come by boat, but he would not leave in that manner, for the gig remained only as memory and a scattering of shattered staves and timbers. Vapor could read the story in the mud even from the embankment above. A small herd of trihorns had been spooked by a pair of longnecks and had stampeded down the beach, running over the boat in the darkness and in their panic.

The stranger broke into a lurching trot, then stopped dead. Vapor settled down to see how he would handle this new situation.

***

Jean’s emotions ran the gamut, from disbelief to anger, to self–recrimination, to fear, to grief, and back to disbelief. The gig was shattered beyond repair and scattered over three-hundred meters of beach.

He dropped down on a broken stave and sat inert. Slowly he forced himself to consider the meaning and implications of his plight. more tomorrow

Even if he were that fortunate, the other cow would kill him. He was sorely tempted. Here would be a fitting end for a man and a hunter. He sighted on the bull, his finger caressing the trigger, but did not fire.

After a time the trihoms wandered away, the cows having sensed something strange in the area. Trihom belligerence is matched only by trihom caution, so the beasts drifted off to the north.

Jean sat beneath the siskal, chewing a fresh stalk and thinking. He tried to unravel what had held his finger. It was partly because of what he had glimpsed on the island – the possibility of an existence where killing did not reign supreme. It was also partly the influence of Levi-Stuer who had preached that being a man was more than merely being a hunter. Part of his hesitation was due to his own thinking as well. He had done things that no man had done before. No brave hunter from the colony had ever dared the lake or sought out the secret of the disappearing herds, yet he, a cripple, had done so. His impulses had been largely self-destructive, true, but they were not so any longer. He had faced death and therein found the courage to face life.

When he crawled out of the bushes and set off he limped no less but was somehow less conscious of it.

He had not found new self-worth in a moment, but in a moment he had realized the culmination of that which had been building for a year. He was a man; let others think what they wished – he knew his own worth.

And having so reestablished his own worth, his loneliness was thereby intensified.

***

Firelight flickered in the night. Jean lay against the backrest of lal that he had woven, contemplating the fire and the various night sounds beyond. His belly was full to repletion and a massive hunk of humpox meat hung beside the fire, slowly drying and cooking. The carcass that had given up this meat lay nearly a half kilometer to the west and was doubtless even now being stripped by longnecks and krats. Jean had killed early in the afternoon and had lost no time getting what meat he could eat and retreating before the carnivores arrived.

His rifle, carefully recharged, lay across his knees. Behind him was a shallow pool which would give warning splashes if anything tried to reach him from that side. He did not even bother to turn his head in that direction. Ahead the ground fell away from the hummock he had chosen and any carnivores out there would be wary of the fire. Of course he dared not sleep until he returned to the gig and put safely out into the lake. That he would do in the morning, for he had much to think about tonight.

He had found the herds, which had been his ostensible purpose. Now he could return to the colony with his findings. Yet he knew that few would be interested, for it would be knowledge without practical import.

For the first time since his injury, he was lonely for humankind. Even during the year he had spent with Levi–Stuer he had shunned his fellows. Now he was transformed, though outwardly unchanged. It had been a slow process, but he had established a deeper acquaintance with himself and a truer picture of his abilities and failings.

He had no illusions about his fellow man, however. They would no more accept him now than they had before. This then was his dilemma, that he had progressed beyond his fellows and was thereby cast out.

Beyond the firelight, eyes watched him. Yellow, slitted eyes on a finely sculpted head – longneck. Other eyes watched him as well, brown eyes like his own, set in a human face. more tomorrow

It would be necessary to go inland to hunt but Jean doubted his ability to do so on foot, so he found a creek, furled the sail and bent over the oars. The flood washed about him as he struggled upstream. He had drawn the sideboards up to reduce both draft and drag. After half an hour of struggling he had not gained a hundred meters. The flood was simply too strong. He let the gig slip back downstream. He was too tired to curse.

Jean rode the current out into the lake, caught fish, and ate them raw. The pain in his leg became excruciating from the unaccustomed strain at the oars, but the pain inside his chest was worse. Once again he had been frustrated; once again the verdict of his peers had been vindicated – he was a cripple and therefore unworthy.

***

That night he relived in dreams a portion of his island ordeal, and when he woke he could not sort the memory of dream from the memory of reality. Had the whole affair been hallucination? A comforting thought, but Jean found himself clinging to the memory. He feared it, but feared more to lose it.

By faint moonlight he let semen fall into the water, then lay back, scarcely relieved, to mourn the passing of a fantasy.

***

He made a final pull on the oars and the gig grounded against the gravel beach. Shipping the oars, he lifted his bad leg overside, then pivoted on the gunwale and dropped into the shallow water. He took the painter and painfully dragged the gig higher up on the beach. Jean was going hunting. He might not return, but he refused to acknowledge the doubts that tried to unman him. He took only his rifle and ammunition and the clothes he was wearing.

At this point the shore consisted of a beach backed by a steep embankment which Jean tried unsuccessfully to climb, then turned down the beach searching for a break. He found it in the form of a small stream which had cut through and won free to the lake. The ditch was too steep and muddy to negotiate, so Jean stepped into the stream and walked up the stream bed in knee-deep water. His feet had been numb for an hour in the snowmelt and now that numbness crept upward.

Out on top he was in a low jungle of mixed bushes, none of which were more than man-height and all of which had grown since the melt began. The first sprigs of gluegrass were appearing but would not become a gummy carpet until the waters had further receded. He could not see twenty meters ahead.

Here he would hunt. Here the reduced visibility gave even a slow-moving cripple a chance to blunder upon game. Of course, hunting alone like this he was not likely to survive long, but at least he could go out like a man.

Twenty minutes later something stirred in the bushes before him. Moving inland meant moving westward into the prevailing wind, so Jean could reasonably expect to catch the animal unaware. He moved carefully through the ankle-deep mud.

Trihorns! Of the creatures he might meet, only the longnecks were more dangerous. Jean faded back into a clump of siskal and waited, his rifle ready. There was a bull with two cows, all in full antler, along with three calves. He could probably kill the bull with his first shot; he might kill one cow with his untried underbarrel. Even if he were that fortunate, the other cow would kill him. more tomorrow

By Jean’s calculations, the north tending melt would return to the latitude of the colony about 180 Harmony days after his departure. His excursion toward the center of the island had occurred on the eightieth day of his journey so it was clear that he would need speed to reach the opposite side of the lake in time to catch the returning melt.

He need not have worried. The new sail and sideboards gave him speed and, more important, let him lie closer to the wind so that he could proceed more directly toward the west. Where before he had fought helplessly against the wind, he now cut purposefully toward the southwest on an endless tack. From first light until long after dark he held his course and every night he wrapped himself in the hide sail for warmth.

Every night he dreamed of Aeolios and her beauty, and he dreamed also of the presence.

Had it been real?

Thirty-seven days out from the island, Jean sighted the opposite shore of the lake in the sunset. By noon of the next day he had reached it and beached the gig. It was a low shore, icy and snow-covered. He had not brought skis, for his crippled leg prevented their use, so he was restricted to floundering near the shore.

He shoveled away the snow from the lee of a cutbank and tore up the ragged remains of last melt’s bushes to build a fire. Wrapped in the sail, he luxuriated again in the feel of solid earth.

He stayed overnight, basking in the warmth of the fire and planning. He roasted fish in the coals. In the morning he would start south, following the shore until he reached the melt.

He followed the shore southward for two weeks, beaching the gig each night for the comfort of a fire. Soon the snow showed signs of noon melting; the surface was glazed and hard when he went ashore in the late afternoon. Then it was still liquid in the afternoon. Two days later he began seeing patches of bare earth.

Now he was coming into dangerous territory. Soon the first of the leers and krats would appear if his theory was correct. He stopped sleeping ashore, but anchored just off shore and watched. The next evening he saw a krat. It cautiously descended to the lake shore searching for danger. Jean tracked it with his rifle, but his ammunition was too scarce to waste on such a small, bad-tasting carnivore.

The next night he saw tracks of leer and krats. In the morning he waited until nearly noon before abandoning his post. That night he saw leers but they were too wary to approach the gig.

Jean was becoming angry. His hunts had been frustrated before and he had taken it in stride, knowing that there would always be another day. But then he had been whole. Now he knew that it was his lameness that stood between him and a kill and he was getting almighty tired of fish.

He put out further into the lake and sailed south four days without approaching the shore, intending to reach the region of high melt. When he put to shore again the character of the land had changed completely. The snow was gone and the creeks were flowing bank-full in roiling, muddy flood. His visibility was restricted, but he could see the tops of the lal bushes waving in the wind and the lakeshore was a sea of muddy tracks. more tomorrow

Only the dilwildi on this island and the herbies survived. The winged people were utterly destroyed. Why?

The presence was not bound by the material world.

It did not perceive time as a unidirectional flow but as a stationary axis along which its perceptions could move at will. To the presence the winged people still lived at the height of their glory, as did the ice ages and the new law of antler and fang. All was not “good,” for the concept had no meaning. All was. It was enough.

But now there was a disturbance in the all. The presence was questing for the source and meaning of the disturbance.

Intelligence was moving again on his planet. It had no place in his projection of the future, for this was a planet that could never produce intelligence, save when the presence moved in the world and made it so. This he had done once and was satisfied. That intelligence had come again was a negation of his powers of prediction.

It was a discontinuity in the all. He would investigate.

He observed the works of man, wingless man. His power was great, but here was a thing beyond his understanding so he bided his time. For one to whom eons were as heartbeats, the wait of a generation was not to be noticed. Then one came to the island! He moved to draw it to him.

And it had defied him! An insignificant creature that he could have snuffed with a thought; it had defied him!

None had ever defied him before. Anger warred with curiosity.

So it was that he took up the creature and showed it the wonders that were himself. Then he arrowed his consciousness into the pitiful mind before him.

***

Jean screamed!

***

The world was rocks and sunlight; harsh, unrelenting. No living thing moved. The wind sighed through the ruins and the dilwildi had gone.

Jean was alone.

He stood; swayed; pain was a living river of fire surging through his body. The ruins lay before him, waterless and forgotten.

Dismissed. He had been tried and found insignificant.

Did Moses feel like this? Should I carve tablets of stone to carry back from my Sinai?

Jean’s stomach contracted and his mouth was sand. Surely much time had passed since he had climbed the mountain. Starting down, he stumbled.

His crooked leg. It could have healed him, had it chosen to do so.

Should he take back his revelation to those who had cast him out? Should he claim holiness and its fruits – food for his table and a woman for his bed? A bitter taste of unlaughed jest was in his mouth. What woman could ever make him forget Aeolios?

***

Swaying slightly, the Prophet came down from his mountain.

*****

Was this a God or a hallucination. You decide. I’ve said all I intend to on the subject.

FYI, concerning the phrase, “But now there was a disturbance in the all.” This was written before Star Wars and its “disturbance in the force”. If you need know where I might have heard a similar phrase before, try Doc Smith. more tomorrow

It was a temple or palace, no doubt, but it was not greatly different from the city at large. Before me was a parklike expanse of trees and grass; in the center of the park was a pavilion like the one I had found myself in when I arrived here.

The winged men were gone in a rumble of wings before I could ask them what was to come next. Either they feared this place or the felt that even one such as I would know what to do here. In that they were mistaken.

The pavilion sat in the center of the park and was the most likely place to go. No doubt those who had ordered my coming expected me to enter it.

I picked a fruit from a nearby siskal, eased myself to the ground and turned my back to the pavilion. The fruit was exceptionally sweet and I was glad to get off my feet.

The presence returned. I ignored it and continued to eat.

Are you unaware of us?

“Of course not.”

Then why do you ignore us?

“Among my people it is a gesture of contempt!”

The fruit was snatched from my hand, the sky darkened, the ground heaved, and I was thrown prone. Fear was in me, more fear than I had ever known. I strove to conquer it in the only way I could, by hurling curses at the presence. There was sudden silence.

There was more than silence.

There was a complete absence of light or sound, touch or feeling of warmth and cold. My mind was somewhere, still within my skull perhaps, but utterly bereft of sensory input.

I was alone, as utterly alone as human can ever be.

I was afraid, but that feeling passed.

I was beyond fear, but not beyond loneliness.

I was myself, but without others to lend boundaries to myself. I was everything; therefore I was nothing.

I was a lone dust mote floating forever in interstellar space and I was God. Nothing and everything; in the realm of uttermost loneliness both are the same.

As I was unbounded in space, so was I unbounded in time. My consciousness stretched eternally forward and backward and in that vast expanse there was none but me.

In the midst of nowhere, the presence came to sit by my side. It gestured with an absent hand and the stars shone about us. They wheeled in their courses and one grew until all others were occluded. About it swarmed planets and one of these grew until it blotted out the others. Gigantic polar caps receded and advanced and receded and advanced. Species were gained and lost until at last there rose a genus of winged animals capable of fleeing before the advancing ice. They multiplied and grew dominant. Species were formed and lost, but two outstripped the rest, one large and one small.

The presence made his will known on these unformed species and they worshipped him, but as their intelligence was imperfect their worship was imperfect, so the presence moved his will upon them and they were given speech. He made the larger dominant over the smaller and gave it intelligence far greater than the smaller so that even as the larger worshipped the presence, so the smaller would worship the larger.

Thus the world was made perfect.

Again the ice caps advanced and species were broken. The ice retreated and new species arose, horned and angry species, unlike the gentle creations of the presence. Only the dilwildi on this island and the herbies survived. The winged people were utterly destroyed.

Why? more tomorrow

Aeolios emerged from her trance and crossed the park to me. There was a mixture of contrition and pity on her face as she touched my forehead. “I am sorry, Jeandubois. In my ignorance I think you mad, but in my understanding I know you are merely deluded. The masters tell me that you think the chronology to be real and that I should be patient with your lack of understanding. They say I am to tell you that, in your erroneous way of thinking, you are in the past, but that the term has no meaning. I am sorry, Jeandubois; it is all too much for me to understand, though I convey the message.”

“Who are the masters?”

She struggled visibly with her confusion, but did not break contact. “The masters are the masters! How can you ask such a question?”

“Have patience with my ignorance, Aeolios; I do not know your masters.”

This time she broke contact and fled, stumbling away, then taking to the air. I watched her spiral up and disappear beyond the trees that circled the park.

V

I wandered about the city, trying to make sense of my situation. At first I had merely accepted things as they were or seemed to be, much as one will accept the reality of a dream world. Now I was no longer able to do so, and my fear grew. Where or when was I; how had I come here; why was I here; would I be allowed to leave? Lovely as the city was, it was not of my world.

Wherever I went the dilwildi followed me, seeming to spy on me. Were they servants of the masters, and were the masters the same personages as the presence I had felt before?

A winged male dropped beside me, scattering the dilwildi in clumsy haste. Unlike Aeolios, he had no smile for me. “The masters wish your presence,” he announced.

“Excellent. I have a few questions to ask them.”

Irritation crossed his face at my statement.

“One does not ask the masters questions. One hears them and obeys.”

“Perhaps,” was my only reply as I sought to restrain my own irritation.

He guided me through the maze that was his city, moving ever upward. I lagged behind, hampered by my leg, and he waited for me, his face as cold as the stones around us. My fear had been growing since I woke this morning and was now a knot in my middle. I was unarmed. My rifle and blade were at the gig and even my antler cane was nowhere in sight.

We walked down grassy paths through the heart of the city. There were no boulevards, for the winged people would have no need of them, only the paths where the herbies roamed free. Finally we reached a wall twice man-height that stretched away in both directions until it was lost in the trees. My companion trilled loudly and a trio of others like him dropped down to his aid. They gripped my shoulders and, beating their wings heavily, lifted me into the courtyard beyond.

*****

Over the years, I have re-read Jandrax many times, but never with the intensity that serializing it demands. Now I keep hearing old Star Trek scripts in my head. Bow to the will of Landru!

That isn’t an apology. I would write the story differently today, but I stand by what is here. Either we created God, or God created us. One way or the other, there is a universal relationship between humans and a being who demands our loyalty and can strike us dead for failing him. We can deny his existence (and hope we are right), or write a script where he turns out to be a computer, or leave the matter undecided, but we have to address the question. And we have to do it in words and gestures and symbols that communicate. more tomorrow