Kallatah’s eyes were shining. She seemed to have lost her fear, and suddenly she too was joining in the attack on the lizards. She picked up a stone and hurled it, and her laughter rang out defiantly above the screams of the natives.
More lizards appeared, creating such panic that a few of the women ran shrieking back into their huts again. The sky had become a solid sheet of flame, and every hut in the village was writhing in fiery radiance.
There was a continuous loud scrambling and flapping noise as the lizards tried in vain to take flight. Something had crippled and imprisoned them in the flame-streaked region between the huts and they were powerless to escape from it.
I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. I wasn’t sure just how the first destructive assault would be made on the lizards, whether the mental tensions would increase first, or the physical ones shatter the beasts with a sudden, explosive violence.
With poltergeists you can never be sure. The powerful waves of their thoughts and emotions sweep through their minds in erratic currents, and when a post-hypnotic command enters the picture—
We didn’t have long to wait. With a shrill scream one of the lizards leapt high into the air and was slammed back against a tree, so violently that it sagged to the ground without a single convulsive quiver of expiring life. A fire broke out where it lay, danced and flickered about it. Another lizard was lifted high into the air, and sent spinning with a terrible spasmodic contraction of its entire bulk.
The scramblings of the other lizards became more frantic, turned into a hideous twisting and squirming that sent chills coursing the length of my spine. Horribly one of the beasts exploded. Its chest was blown away as it reared on its hindlimbs, and was carried backwards by a whirling spiral of flame. Others were ripped apart as if by invisible talons, flattened out, crushed and shredded into fragments.
We saw the warriors then. Straight into the village clearing they strode, Geipgos at their head and his son Slagoon walking proudly at his side. They were flourishing their spears and shouting, and the sky glow was bright on their green-bronze shoulders, and was mirrored in their eyes.
I had been right in my prediction. In less than an hour the rumblings ceased and the ground stopped trembling. The fieriness vanished from the sky. But for three days the warriors pursued the lizards across the crater’s rim, descending into the smoke-filled clefts where for centuries they had nested and multiplied, routing and shattering them until Dracona was cleansed and a brave new dawn broke over Geipgos’ unbowed head.
I stood with Kallatah on a cloud-wreathed peak staring down.
“When man is free to shape his own destiny,” I said, “civilization does not beat its shining wings in vain. They will go forward boldly now, with the yoke of superstition forever removed from their necks.”
“Thanks to you,” Kallatah said.
“It was not too difficult to predict the exact moment of the volcano’s eruption,” I said. “As for the post-hypnotic command—you could have done that too.”
Kallatah turned and looked at me, her eyes strangely luminous. “Taro Hargon,” she said. “I am going to tell you something. From the first moment I saw you I knew that you were a man.”
I stared at her, wondering.
“It takes the courage and daring and resourcefulness of the Earthborn to do what you did. The Guiding Council realized that we on Tragor had need of the Earthborn too. Our heritage had worn too thin. So they selected a man of Terra with truly great gifts of body and mind to guide us all—”
I grew alarmed, still wondering how insecure my secret had become.
“Oh, you returned for a lark. Took to wandering again, as an Earthborn trader. For an hour and a day.”
She laughed and her hands were suddenly busy at the flaps of my weather jacket, peeling them back to bring the shining insignia into view.
“Supreme Councillor and Guide,” she whispered. “I knew it from the first.”
“You knew—”
“Oh, my darling, yes. I guessed, I knew. In the hushed great halls the footsteps of a man like you were solely needed. The Guiding Council had vision and strength too—the courage to break through all taboos and seek the one right man for a task no other man could do.
“Naturally you are human still. In my presence you felt at first a certain shyness. I could see that you were searching inwardly for flaws that might have made you seem unworthy in my eyes. It was a boyish, foolish trait—and from that moment I loved you with all my heart. To be great and doubt one’s greatness is the surest path to a woman’s heart.”
I reached out and took her into my arms. “No man is a safe guide when he walks alone,” I said. “It is time that the Councillor took a wife.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “It is time.”
There was silence on the peak as we stared down together into the shining valley far below.
Colophon
Short Fiction
were published between 1922 and 1954 by
Frank Belknap Long.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Robin Whittleton,
and is based on transcriptions produced between 2007 and 2024 by
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan, Alexander Bauer, Stephen Blundell, Joel Schlosberg, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Landscape in the Park,
a painting completed in 1920 by
Fritz Stuckenberg.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The
