Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs (8 page)

I took a hearty swallow of this Amtorian
fíonbeior
and at once promised myself to be more cautious with the beverage. Not that it was unpleasant stuff. On the contrary, it was thoroughly delicious, but it had hardly had time to reach my stomach when my ears were filled with a rushing sound and my eyes filled with tears.

I lowered my goblet.

The elf laughed.

“Very well,” he rasped, “I see that one of our guests has already learned a valuable lesson. I am pleased.”

A peculiar expression gave his face the appearance of a grinning skull for the barest of moments.

“As is our custom,” he resumed, “we welcome our guests by introducing ourselves. Then we shall ask them to do the same.”

He nodded his head, as if approving of his own conduct.

“In my lifetime I have been known by many names,” he said, “but for now you may call me simply Dr. Bodog. I am your host. You are welcome in my home. We shall all get to know one another well during your stay.”

Clearly, he was addressing Duare and myself.

“And my children,” he went on, nodding his great, hairless dome toward the man and woman who had entered the hall along with Duare.

“Yes,” the man said, raising his goblet and taking a ceremonial sip of the
fíonbeior.
I watched as everyone at the table emulated him. This time, I assure you, I was more cautious.

“My name is Oggar,” he stated. His voice was deep and powerful, a suitable match for his heavily muscled frame.

“And I,” his female counterpart intoned, “am called Istara.” She nodded to us, sipped carefully at her
fíonbeior.
She shot a mischievous glance at Duare and myself. “Do you not recognize me?”

She did look vaguely familiar to me, but I confess that I was unable to place her. Had I ever encountered her before today, here on the planet Venus? Or did she resemble some woman I had known on my native planet, or perhaps a movie star whose visage I had seen on the silver screen in years before?

She shook her had amusedly. “You were engaged in what seemed like an unpleasant encounter with some
fearmharr arrachtachs
when first we met. It was mere hours ago. My feelings are hurt that you do not recognize me.”

I stared. Was she—was this beautiful young woman—the courageous and skillful pilot who had flown the mechanical dragonfly to Duare’s and my own rescue from the attack of our grassy doppelgangers? Was it she who had aimed the blue ray at those creatures, disrupting their plan of attack and reducing them to the seemingly ordinary grass from which they had sprung?

“Yes,” Istara insisted as if reading my thoughts, “it was indeed I.” She laughed, a delighted, rippling sound of amusement. Her facial expression seemed to reach out to the others at the table, especially to Duare and myself, inviting us to join in her good-natured amusement.

I found myself grinning involuntarily. The joke had indeed been on Duare and me. Duare, however, did not seem to share my willingness to join in Istara’s friendly jest. Instead, she glared angrily at Istara, as if resenting having been made a fool of.

Hoping to break the icy stalemate of the two women, I exchanged smiles with Istara, then asked this tall, blond, almost boyishly attractive, yet ineffably feminine woman, “Why were you silent, then, during our flight from the grass-men to the Potala?”

She shook her head, her soft tresses bouncing merrily. “There are some men who might resent being rescued by a mere girl. I could not risk a quarrel or even a moment’s hesitation during the rescue. I hope you are not angry with me.”

Of course I was not. Istara had saved Duare and me from dire peril. Unfortunately, I could not certify that Duare shared my feelings of gratitude toward Istara.

Our tiny host interrupted this exchange by tapping lightly on his goblet with a golden dining implement. “We have introduced ourselves to our guests,” he rasped in his unpleasant, grating voice. “It is time for them to tell us who they are and why they are here.”

“We are here because we were brought here, Dr. Bodog,” Duare exclaimed angrily. “I am a Princess of the Realm of Vepaja, and I wish to know by what right you hold me here.”

I noted that she used the Amtorian word for
me
, not
us,
and wondered what thought had provoked that choice of expression. Before I could speak, however, our host responded to Duare’s demand with a smile.

A smile, I say, but somehow, I must admit, I found Dr. Bodog’s smile more intimidating than reassuring. He had done nothing to harm Duare or myself that I knew of. He had, in fact, sent his daughter to rescue the two of us from our probable demise. And yet I could not bring myself to trust him.

Still, as black-clad, silent servants brought viands and placed them on the table, Dr. Bodog spoke, and I drank in every word, wishing, as ever any explorer who is a scientist at heart would do, to retain and understand all that this strange, wizened person had to say.

“This building, which you call a Potala, is both my home and my workplace. It has been the home and workplace of my family for—you will forgive me, but I wonder if should tell you how long. I do not wish to withhold this information, Your Highness.” I noticed that he uttered the honorific in a tone of irony. “It is merely that I fear you will find the truth incredible, which would place us in a most uncomfortable position.”

“Go ahead, Doctor.” Duare spoke that last word in a tone to match that of our host. These were worthy debating foes, I realized. I had not previously realized that Duare had such skills, nor that she would react to Dr. Bodog with such scorn.

“Very well,” he resumed. “My family had its origins on a continent that spanned a broad region in the greatest ocean of the planet whose orbit lies beyond that of Amtor.”

“The Earth!” I exclaimed.

“The science of my people was far advanced. They had achieved great discoveries in the realm of optics and astronomy. It was their custom to study the celestial objects that filled the night sky of Earth. A sight, unfortunately, denied to denizens of Amtor.”

During Dr. Bodog’s narration, the silent servants had continued to bring delicious dishes—Venusian versions of venison, pheasant, brook trout, vegetables and spices. Of course none of these were exactly the same as their Earthly counterparts, but they were without exception delicious beyond compare. And I imagine I need not add that our goblets were kept filled with the local
fíonbeior.

I will say this for the diminutive doctor: despite his rasping delivery and the fact that I found something disquietingly untrustworthy about him, his story was fascinating. He told of an ancient civilization that spanned a huge continent located in the greatest of Earth’s oceans. The astronomers of that ancient civilization had built powerful telescopes that scanned the night skies, searching out the wonders of the universe.

These people were the oldest humans in the world (Dr. Bodog claimed) and had colonized every continent. The high plateau of Tibet was an important outpost, and the Potala Palace, which later came to be the abode of the highest of high lamas, was the headquarters of their settlement.

Their astronomers had studied the planets of the solar system, searching for another habitable world. They had settled upon Venus. Their name for it was Amtarra, Dr. Bodog stated, causing me to wonder if that was the original form of the word Amtor. Amtarra was almost identical in size and mass to Earth. It was closer to the Sun, indicating a warm, even tropical climate. And it was covered with clouds, implying a plentiful supply of water.

In short, Venus—Amtarra—Amtor—was very likely a suitable place for a human settlement. It might even harbor indigenous life-forms! The most brilliant engineers of Earth’s incredibly ancient civilization set out to construct machines that might carry settlers to Amtarra.

At this point the astronomers announced a dreadful discovery. A huge planetoid, one of the countless miniature worlds that orbited between the fourth and fifth planets of the Sun, had collided with a smaller planetoid. Such events were not uncommon, of course, and at first the larger of the two objects continued on its way. But its orbit had been shifted, and in its new, irregular path, it was headed for Earth. Its arrival would occur in twenty years, time enough to build a fleet of machines that would carry hundreds of thousands of humans to Amtarra. The fleet would also be fitted to bring seeds for food crops and breeding stock of animals.

Was this, I wondered, the origin of the story of Noah’s Ark?

Then disaster was piled upon disaster! Still another planetoid collided with the one headed for Earth. Its path was once more diverted. Instead of swinging around the sun, picking up more energy on each pass until, in twenty years, the planetoid would strike the Earth—it was now headed straight for our planet. It would arrive within a matter not of twenty years but merely of months. Engineers worked feverishly to complete the fleet of space fliers, but had barely got beyond the level of a prototype when they realized they were running out of time.

One of the engineers working on the project, the most intelligent and noble of all men on Earth (according to Dr. Bodog), hatched a desperate plan for the salvation of humanity. In the dead of night he smuggled his own wife and children aboard the prototype space flier and launched the craft on a trajectory for Amtarra.

The flight was successful, but there was no time to build any more fliers. Even as the prototype space flier sped past the moon, the engineer’s wife turned to look back at the Earth and beheld the impact of the planetoid. It landed in the ocean just off the coast of the great continent. The explosion that its impact caused was terrible. Plumes of steam rose hundreds of miles into the air. Huge tsunamis swept the continents. The great land mass from which the space flier had lifted was pelted with fragments of rock and dirt ranging in size from grains of sand to boulders half the size of Earth’s moon.

Only the highest peaks on the planet were not drowned. A relative handful of humans and other species survived on Earth. But the engineer and his family landed safely on Amtarra.

“And you see before you the last surviving descendents of those settlers,” Dr. Bodog stated, indicating himself, Istara, and Oggar. And at this moment I thought I heard a distant, desperate cry of despair in a female voice.

Dr. Bodog, Istara and Oggar pointedly ignored the sound.

Duare exclaimed, “What was that?”

Dr. Bodog said, “I heard nothing. Did you hear anything, Istara, Oggar?”

The others responded negatively to the question.

Dr. Bodog addressed me. “And now, sir, if you will be so kind as to share your own story with us . . .”

“My name is Carson Napier,” I told him. “I come from—” At this point I realized that I did not trust this man to know the location of my own home. “I come from Key West, Florida.” I had been in that city and knew it well enough to deceive Dr. Bodog, should he query me about its layout and architecture.

“I left Earth on board an experimental space rocket, headed, I had thought, for the planet Mars.” I looked at the others, wondering what they would make of my tale. Surely Dr. Bodog would comprehend, but to Duare, born and raised beneath the double cloud envelope of Amtor, the very concept of black space dotted with millions of suns and populated by planets comparable to her home would in all likelihood defy her ability to comprehend.

And as for Istara and Oggar—these two were utterly mysterious to me. Had they been born on Amtor? For that matter, had their father, the wizened Dr. Bodog, been born here? What did they know of the universe beyond the clouds that surrounded this world? I tried to explain as best I could the nature of the solar system and my attempt to travel to Mars, only to be drawn off-course by the gravitational attraction of Luna. How could my navigator have been so foolish as to overlook that? How could I have been so irresponsible as to accept his charts without insisting that we go over every calculation together?

Only sheer luck—at least if you do not accept the notion of divine intervention—had caused my rocket to veer toward Venus. Once beneath the clouds, I was able to bring my ship to a safe landing, only to have it swallowed by a pit of steaming quicksand from which I was barely able to escape with my life.

My adventures on Venus had been many and thrilling, and my love for Duare had sustained me through uncounted moments of peril and of fear, but I longed desperately to return to Earth and to share my story with the friends I had left behind.

Dr. Bodog gestured to one of the black-clad servitors who seemed always to hover in the room. He spoke a few words, too softly for me to make out, and the servitor disappeared, to return in a short time bearing a carefully crafted globe of the Earth. This he placed on the table between us.

I determined that this globe reflected the reality of the planet I had left not so very long ago, save that a huge continent stretched across the Pacific Ocean, from a point near Easter Island off the coast of South America nearly to the Indo-Chinese peninsula in Southeast Asia.

“Gone,” I told Dr. Bodog. I indicated the continent which I now recognized as the legendary Lemuria. “Some islands survive, dotting the broad Pacific Ocean. Hawaii, New Guinea, Java, Sumatra. Otherwise, Lemuria is gone. The rest of the Earth seems to have recovered well from the catastrophe, and the Potala still stands in high Tibet. That is all that remains of your civilization.”

“Strange names,” Dr. Bodog grated. “Hawaii, Sumatra, Lemuria. You call the continent Lemuria, the ocean the Pacific.” He heaved a sigh, and for a moment I pitied him. How old was he? A cold hand seemed to clutch at my spine. Was this tiny, wizened man the engineer he had spoken of? Had he saved humankind—in his own estimation—by stealing the prototype space flier and rescuing his own family in preference to the millions who must be sacrificed?

Had his wife been driven mad by the sight of the planetoid striking the Earth, and was the cry of pain and desperation I had heard that woman, prisoned somewhere in this replica of the Potala?

Our meal was completed by now. The fire that gave both warmth and illumination to the room had burned low and was guttering toward extinction.