Kenneth Bulmer - Land Beyond the Map

Varnat waved goodbye and his chair atop its shining bowl floated away up into the sun-drenched sky towards the open airlock of the ship.

“Farewell, people of this planet,” he said, “even if you are not of this dimension. Maybe we will meet again, one day — who knows?”

But Crane, for one, knew that to be polite fiction; the Loti were gone from earth forever. The airlock closed. A rumble, quickly cut off, shook the earth. Then, without fuss, quietly, the ship lifted, rose higher and faster, flickered — and vanished.

“They’re gone,” Polly whispered. “Across the empty spaces between the stars — going home.”

Around them now stretched the ruins of the city, girdled by the white guardian wall. Beyond that the land heaved and writhed, lost in a torment of primeval chaos. Each person picked up a suitcase or a package.

“You’ll have to watch out for Barney,” Crane told Colla. “He won’t know what to do with all those diamonds.”

“Sure and we’ll keep an eye out for him. Didn’t the Loti talk to him, now? Isn’t he as sane as you or I now?”

“Of course I am,” said Barney. “And the quicker we get back to our own Earth the better. I have plans.”

The world shimmered around them. A keening wind smote down for a moment so that their hair blew and their clothes ruffled and Polly clasped Crane harder. The land reared up. The sky fell, parted and drained away:

Then they were standing on the white road with the wreck of a truck in the ditch and an Austin slewed around backwards into the opposite ditch. Around them now lay the boglands of dear ould Ireland — and it was raining.

“Y’know” said Crane as they started the damp walk into Omagh, “I feel sad about the Loti. Such a decent lot of folks. They had super-science at their fingertips. Yet they lost out. They’d have lost out even if McArdle — or Trangor — had been pure as a saint.”

“But he wasn’t,” said Gould. “And we nearly had our old Earth taken over by these alien beasties…”

“But, still and all—” Crane felt the mystery of the reasons why races were not the same. “If the Loti had been Earthmen with all that knowledge they wouldn’t have given up. We’d have conquered and tamed the Map Country.”

“The Loti weren’t as tough as we are. Only Trangor — and he reflected the worst side of human nature.” Polly waved a hand. “But it’s still there. It may be in another dimension unseen by us. But it’s indubitably there. The Map Country exists. Maybe some day we’ll go back and this time we’ll know how to tame it — and will.”

Crane tucked her hand firmly under his arm. “Or perhaps our children will be the ones to go back.” They strode out along the road in the soft Irish rain. “Maybe some fine day they’ll turn the Unmapped Country into the Mapped Country.”

And they would.

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