Henry Kuttner: The Creature from Beyond Infinity

He shook his head, put the pipe away, and pottered off in search of his rare drinks. Stephen returned to his work.

What was the purpose of these years of intensive study? He scarcely knew. His mind was a vessel to be filled with the clear, exhilarating liquor of knowledge. As Sammy's system craved alcohol, so Stephen's brain thirsted for wisdom. Study and experiment were to him a delight that approached actual ecstasy. As an athlete gets keen pleasure from the exercise of his well trained body, so Stephen exulted in the exercise of his mind.

Unimaginable eons before, in the teeming seas of a primeval world, life-forms had fed their blind hunger. That was appetite of the flesh.

Stephen's hunger was the appetite of the mind. But it also made him blind, in a different way. He was a godlike man, and he was—unhuman.

By 1941 he was the greatest scientist in the world.

Before man created gods, Ardath was. In his space ship, swinging silently around the world, he slept as the ages went past. .

Sometimes he woke and searched, always in vain, for intelligent life in the land below. The road of evolution was long and bloody.

Dark weariness shrouded Ardath as he saw the vast, mindless, terrible behemoths of the oceans. Monsters wallowed into the swamps. The ground shook beneath the tread of tyrant lizards. Brontosaurs and pterodactyls lived and fed and died.

There were mammals—oehippus the fleet and three-toed, and a tiny marsupial in which the flame of intelligence glowed feebly. But the titan reptiles ruled. Mammals could not survive in this savage, thundering world.

Forests of weeds and bamboo towered in a tropical zone that stretched almost to the poles. Ardath pondered, studied for a time in his laboratory—and the Ice Age came.

Was Ardath responsible? Perhaps. His science was not Earthly, and his powers were unimaginable. The ice mountains swept down, blowing their frigid breath upon the forests and the reptile giants.

Southward the hegira fled. It was the Day of Judgment for the idiot colossi that had ruled too long.

But the mammals survived. Shuddering in the narrow equatorial belt, they starved and whimpered. But they lived, and they evolved, while Ardath slept again…

When he awoke, he found beast-men, hairy and ferocious. They dwelt in gregarious packs, ruled by an Old Man who had proved himself strongest of the band.

But always the chill winds of the icelands tore at them as they crouched in their caves.

Ardath found one, wiser than the rest, and taught him the use of fire. Then the alien man sent his ship arrowing up from Earth, while flames began to burn wanly before cave-mouths. In grunts and sign language the story was told. Ages later, man would tell the tale of Prometheus, who stole fire from the very gods of heaven.

Folk-lore is filled with the legends of men who visited the gods—the Little People or the Sky-dwellers—and returned with strange powers. Arrows and spears, the smelting of ores, the sowing and reaping of grain… How many inventions could be traced to Ardath?

But at last Ardath slept for a longer time than ever before, and then he awoke.

Dark was the city. Flambeaux were numerous as fireflies in the gloomy streets. The metropolis lay like a crouching beast on the shore, a vast conglomeration of stone, crude and colossal.

The ship of Ardath hung far above the city, unseen in the darkness of the night. Ardath himself was busy in his laboratory, working on a curiously constructed device that measured the frequency and strength of mentality. Thought created electrical energy, and Ardath's machine registered the power of that energy. Delicately he sent an invisible narrow-wave beam down into the city far beneath.

On a gauge a needle crept up, halted, dipped, and mounted again. Ardath reset a dial. Intelligent beings dwelt on Earth now, but their intelligence was far inferior to Ardath's. He was searching for a higher level.

The needle was inactive as Ardath swept the city with his ray. Useless! The pointer did not even quiver. The mental giant Ardath sought was not here, though this was the greatest metropolis of the primeval world.

But suddenly the needle jerked slightly. Ardath halted the ray and turned to a television screen. Using the beam as a carrier, he focused upon a scene that sprang into instant visibility.

He saw a throne of black stone upon which a woman sat. Tall and majestic, an Amazon of forty or more, she had lean, rugged features, and wore plain garments of leather.

Guards flanked her, gigantic, stolid, armed with spears. Before the throne a man stood, and it was at this man that Ardath stared.

For months the Kyrian's ship had scoured the skies, searching jungles and deserts. Few cities existed. On the northern steppes, shaggy beast-men still dwelt in caves, fighting the mammoth. But the half-men and the hairy elephants were rapidly degenerating. In mountain lakes were villages built on stilts and piers sunken into the mud, but these clans were barbarous. Only on this island were there civilization and intelligence, though lamentably lower than Ardath's own level.

The man from space watched the wisest human on this primitive Earth.

In chains the Earthman stood before the black stone. He was huge, massively thewed, with a bronzed, hairy skin showing through the rags he wore. His face resembled that of a beast, ferocious with hatred. Amber cat's-eyes glared from beneath the beetling brows. The jutting jaw was hidden by a wiry beard that tangled around the nose that was little more than a snout.

Yet in that brute body, Ardath knew, dwelt amazing intelligence. Shrewdness and cunning were well masked by the hideous face and form.

What of the queen? Curious to know, Ardath tested her with his ray. She, too, was more intelligent than most of the savages.

"These two are enemies," Ardath thought. "And I imagine that the man faces danger or death. Well, what is that to me? I cannot live in a time where all are barbarians. It is best that I sleep again."

Yet he hesitated, one hand resting lightly on the controls that would send the ship racing up into space. The barren loneliness of the void, the slow centuries of his dark vigil, crept with icy tentacles into his mind. He thought of the equally long, miserably lonely future.

"Suppose I sleep again and wake in a dead world? It could happen, for my own home planet was destroyed. How could I face another search through space? Theron and the rest had each other…"

He turned back again to watch the two people on the screen.

"They are intelligent, after a fashion, and they would be companions. If I took them with me, and we woke in a lifeless time, they could bring forth a new race which I could train eugenically into the right pattern."

The decision was made. Ardath would sleep again in his ship—but this time not alone.

He glanced at the screen, and his eyes widened. A new factor had entered the problem. Hastily he turned to a complicated machine at his side…

As Thordred the Usurper stood before the throne of his queen, his savage face was immobile. Weaponless, fettered, he nevertheless glared with implacable fury at the woman who had spoiled his plans.

Zana met his gaze coldly. Her harsh features were darkly somber.

"Well?" she asked. "Have you anything to say to me?"

"Nothing," Thordred grunted. "I have failed. That is all."

The huge, almost empty throne room echoed his words eerily.

"Aye, you have failed," the queen said. "And there is but one fate for losers who revolt. You tried to force me from my throne, and instead you stand in chains before me. You have lost, so you must die."

Thordred's grin mocked her calm decision.

"And a woman continues to rule our land. Never in history has this shame been put upon us. Always we have been ruled by men—warriors!"