The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (21 page)

He knew Jotan and its people, from the nightly dreams of his earliest childhood. Every street of the black city he had known and loved, as Khal Kan. Even if it were only a dream, he couldn’t let the old, lovely city and its people be overwhelmed by Egir and his green barbarians.

If Thar was the dream, and the city Jotan was taken and Khal Kan was slain—there would be an end to his precious dreamlife, forever. Only the monotonous existence of Henry Stevens would stretch before him.

And if Thar happened to be the
reality
, then it was doubly vital that Khal Kan’s people be saved from that menace.

“Yet what can I do?” Henry groaned inwardly. “What can Khal Kan do? The Bunts will surely break into the city—”

The poisoned arrows, new to the Jotanians, gave Egir’s green warriors a terrific advantage. That, and their outnumbering hordes, would enable them to scale the walls of Jotan and then the end would be at hand.

“Damn Egir for his deviltry in using those arrows!” Henry muttered. “I wish I could take a dozen machine-guns across. I’d show the cursed traitor.”

It was a vain and idle wish, he knew. Nothing material could traverse the gulf between dream-world and real world, whichever was which. His own body, even—Henry Stevens’ body—never crossed that gulf. AH he took into Thar each night were his memories of Henry Stevens’ life on Earth during the day, and that seemed only a dream.

He
could
take memory across, though. And that thought gave pause to Henry. A faint gleam of hope appeared on his horizon. As Khal Kan, he would remember everything that he did or learned now, as Henry Stevens. Suppose that he—

“By Heaven!” Henry exclaimed excitedly. “There’s a chance I could do it! A trick to overmatch Egir’s poisoned arrows!”

His wife watched him puzzledly as he pored excitedly over certain volumes of their encyclopedia. She saw him hastily jot down notes, and then for a long time that evening he sat, moving his lips, apparently memorizing.

Henry was vibrant with excitement and hope. He, Henry Stevens of Earth, might be able to save Khal Kan’s city for him!

“If Khal Kan will only do it!” he thought prayerfully. “If he won’t just ignore it as dream—”

Waiting tensely for sleep that night, Henry repeated over and over to himself the simple formula he had gleaned from the encyclopedia.

“Khal Kan
must
try it!” he told himself desperately.

Sleep came slowly to him. And as he fell asleep, he knew that in his dream he would wake to what might be the last day of Jotan’s existence.…

Khal Kan awoke with that thought from his dream vibrating in his mind like an ominous tolling.

“The last day of Jotan!” he whispered. “By all the gods—
no!
”

Fiercely, the tall young prince rose and buckled on his sword. It was just dawn, and sea-mists shrouded all the city outside in gray fog.

Golden Wings still lay sleeping, Khal Kan heard a persistent hammering from out in the fog, as he went down to the lower level of the palace. Brusul, in full armor, came stalking up to him.

“All’s quiet,” reported the brawny captain. “The Bunts are still working away at their cursed scaling-ladders. When they are ready, they’ll dear the walls of our men with their damned poisoned arrows, and then come over.”

Khal Kan went out with him and inspected their defenses. As he supervised the placing of their fighting-men around the wall, and gave the white-faced people rough encouragement, something oppressed Khal Kan’s mind. Something he should be doing for the defense of the city—

When he got back to the palace with Brusul, Golden Wings’ slim, leather-clad figure came flying into his arms.

“I dreamed the Bunts were already in the city!” she cried. “And then I awoke and found you gone—”

Khal Kan, soothing her, suddenly stiffened. Her words had recalled that vague, forgotten something that had oppressed him.

“My dream!” he exclaimed. “I remember now—in the dream, on that other world, I learned how to make a weapon against the Bunts.”

It had all come back to him now—the dream in which Henry Stevens had feverishly memorized a formula out of the science of that dream-world of Earth, to help him in his struggle against the Bunts.

For a moment, Khal Kan clutched at new hope. Then his eagerness faded. After all, that was only a dream. Henry Stevens and Earth and its science were only an insubstantial vision of his sleeping mind, and nothing that he learned in that could be of any value.

“I could wish you’d dreamed away the Bunts entirely,” Brusul was saying dryly. “Unfortunately, they’re still outside and it won’t be many hours before they attack.”

Khal Kan was not listening. His mind was revolving the simple formula that Henry Stevens had desperately memorized, in the dream.

“It wouldn’t work,” he thought. “It couldn’t work, when there’s no reality to all that—”

Yet he kept remembering Henry Stevens’ desperate effort to help him. That timid, thin little man he was in his dream each night—that little man had prayed that Khal Kan would not ignore his help, would try the formula.

Khal Kan reached decision. “I’m going to try it—the thing I learned in the dream!” he told the others.

Brusul stared. “Are you wit-struck? Dreams won’t help us now! How could a dream-weapon be of
any
use?”

“I’m not so sure now it was a dream,” Khal Kan muttered. “Maybe
this
is the dream, after all. Oh, hell take all speculations—dream or reality, I’m going to try this thing.”

He shot orders. “Bring all the charcoal you can find, all the sulphur from the street of the apothecaries, and all of the white crystals we use for drying fruits. Those crystals were called ‘saltpeter’ in the dream.”

Scared, wondering men brought the materials to the palace. There, Brusul and Zoor and Golden Wings watched mystifiedly as Khal Kan supervised their preparation.

He remembered clearly the formula that Henry Stevens had memorized in the dream. He had the men pound and pulverize and mix, until a big mass of granular black powder was the result.

“Now bring small metal vases—enough to hold all this—and lampwicks and day,” he ordered.

A captain came running, breathless. “The Bunts have finished their ladders and I think they’re soon going to make their attack, sire!” he cried.

“And our leader lingers here, muddling in minerals!” cried Brusul gustily. “Khal Kan, forget this crazy dream and make ready for battle!”

Khal Kan paid no attention. He was having the men stuff the small metal vases with the black powder, stopping their mouths with clay through which a fuse-like wick protruded.

“Distribute these vases to all our men along the walls,” he ordered. “Tell them, that when the Bunts place their ladders, they are to light the fuses and fling the vases down among the green warriors, at my command.”

“Hell destroy all dreams!” raged Brusul. “What good will such a crazy plan do? Do you think dropping vases on the Bunts will stop them?”

“I don’t know,” Khal Kan muttered. “In the dream, I thought it would. The dream-me called the powder ‘gunpowder’ and the vases ‘grenades.’ And in the dream they seemed a more terrible weapon even than the poisoned arrows.”

Yells from the walls and the warning blare of trumpets ripped across the sunlit city. A great cry swept through Jotan’s streets.

“The Bunts are coming!”

“To the wall!” Khal Kan cried.

From the parapet atop the great wall, the rising sun revealed an ominous spectacle. From all around the landward side of Jotan, the hordes of the Bunts were surging toward the city.

First came a line of green bowmen whose hissing, poisoned shafts were already rattling along the top of the wall. Jotanian warriors sank groaning as the swift poison sped into their blood. Khal Kan held his shield up, and swept Golden Wings behind him as they waited.

Behind the first line of bowmen came Bunts carrying long, rough wooden scaling-ladders. Behind these came the main masses of the stocky green men, armed with bows and short-swords, led by Egir himself.

The ladders came up against the wall, and the blood-chilling Bunt yell broke around the city as the green warriors swarmed catlike up them. Joranians who sought to push over the ladders were smitten by arrows.

“Over the wall and open the gates!” Egir’s bull voice was yelling to his green men. “Let us into Jotan!”

The main horde of the Bunts was already surging toward the gates of the city, while their attackers on the ladders sought to win the wall.

“Now—light the fuses and drop the vases!” Khal Kan yelled along the parapet, through the melee.

Torches at readiness set the wicks alight. The seemingly harmless little metal vases were tossed over into the surging mass of the Bunts.

A series of ear-splitting crashes shook the air, like thunder. White smoke drifted away to show masses of the Bunts felled by the explosions.

“Gods!” cried Brusul appaliedly. “Your dream-weapon is thunder of heaven itself!”

“Magic!” yelled the Bunts, shrinking back aghast from their own dead, tumbling in panic off the ladders. “Flee, brothers!”

The fear-maddened green warriors surged back from the walls of Jotan, breaking in panic-stricken, disorganized masses. Egir’s bull voice could be heard raging, trying to rally them, but in vain.

The men of Jotan who had lighted and flung the new weapons were as horrified as their victims. Khal Kan’s yell aroused them.

“Horses, and after them!” he cried. “Now is our chance to avenge yesterday!”

The gates ground open—and every horsemen left in jotan galloped out after Khal Kan and Golden Wings in pursuit of the routed, green men.

The Bunts made hardly any effort to turn and fight They were madly intent on putting as great a distance as possible between them and Jotan.

“It’s Egir I’m after!” Khal Kan cried to Brusul. “While he lives, no safety for Jotan!”

“See—there he rides!” cried Golden Wings’ silvery voice.

Khal Kan yelled and put spur to his horse as he saw Egir and his Bunt captains riding full tilt toward the Dragals, in an effort to escape.

They rode right through the Seeing Bunts in pursuit of the traitor. They were overtaking him, when Egir turned and saw them coming. The Jotanian renegade uttered a yell, and he and his green captains turned.

“’Ware arrows!” shouted Brusul, behind Khal Kan.

Khal Kan saw the Bunts loosing the vicious shafts, but he saw it only vaguely, for only Egir’s sardonic face was clear to him as he charged.

Sword out, he galloped toward his uncle. Something stung his arm, and he heard a scream from Golden Wings and knew an arrow had hit him.

“My dear nephew, you’ve two minutes to live!” panted Egir, his eyes blazing hate and triumph as they met and their swords clashed. “You’re a dead man now—”

Khal Kan felt a cold, deadly numbness creeping through his arm with incredible rapidity. He summoned all his fast-flowing strength to swing his sword up.

It left his guard open and Egir stabbed viciously as their horses wheeled. Then Khal Kan’s nerveless arm brought his blade down.

“This for my father, Egir!”

The sword shore the traitor’s shoulder and neck half through. And a moment after Egir dropped from the saddle, Khal Kan felt his own numb body falling. He could not feel the impact with the ground.

His mind was darkening and everything was spinning around. It was as though he whirled in a black funnel, and was being sucked down into its depths, yet he could still hear voices of those bending over him.

“Khal Kan!” That was Golden Wings, he knew.

He tried to speak up to them out of the roaring darkness that was engulfing him.

“Jotan—safe now, with Egir gone. The kingship to Brusul. Golden Wings—”

He could not form more words. Khal Kan knew that he was dying. But he knew, at last, that Thar was
not
a dream, for even though his own life was passing, nothing around him was vanishing. But, his darkening brain wondered, if That had been real all the time—

But then, in a flash of light on the very verge of darkness, Khal Kan saw the truth that neither he nor the other had ever imagined.…

Henry Stevens lay dead upon his bed in the neat bedroom of his little suburban cottage. And in the room, his sobbing wife was trying to tell her story to the physician and the psychiatrist.

“It was all so sudden,” she sobbed. “I awoke, and found that Herry was clenching his fists as though in a convulsion and was shouting—something about Jotan being safe now. And then—he was dead—”

The physician was soothing her as he led her to another room. When he came back, his face was keen as he looked at Doctor Thorn.

“You heard her story?” he said to the psychiatrist. “I telephoned you because I understood he’d been consulting you. I can’t understand this thing at all.”

He pointed to Henry’s motionless figure. “The man had nothing organically wrong with him, as I happen to know. Yet he died in his sleep—as though from terrible mental shock.”