This star shall be free
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This Star Shall be Free
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By Murray Leinster
Tork was a simple man of the caves. How could he dream
that the star box held the power to make his people
gods--or only a lost memory in stone?
The urge was part of an Antarean experiment in artificial ecological
imbalance, though of course the cave-folk could not guess that. They
were savages with no interest in science or, indeed, in anything much
except filling their bellies and satisfying other primal urges. They
inhabited a series of caves in a chalk formation above a river that ran
through primordial England and France before it joined the Rhine and
emptied into the sea.
They did not understand the urge at all--which was natural. It followed
the disappearance of the ship from Antares by a full two hours, so they
saw no connection between the two. Anyhow, it was just a vague,
indefinite desire to move to the eastward--an impulse for which they
had no explanation whatever.
Tork was spearing fish from a rock out in the river when the ship
passed overhead. He was a young man, still gangling and awkward. He
wasn’t up to a fight with One-Ear, yet, and had a bad time in
consequence. One-Ear was the boss male of the cave-dwellers’ colony in
the cliff over the river. He wanted to chase Tork away or kill him, and
Tork had to be on guard every second. But he felt safe out on his rock.
He had just speared a fine ganoid when he heard a howl of terror from
the shore. He jerked his head around. He saw Bent-Leg, the other adult
male, go hobbling in terror toward his own cave-mouth, and he saw
One-Ear knock two of his wives and three children off the ladder to his
cave, so he could get in first. The others shrieked and popped into
whatever crevice was at hand, including the small opening in which Tork
himself slept when he dared. Then there was stillness.
Tork stared blankly. He saw no cause for alarm ashore. He ran his eyes
along the top of the cliff. He saw birch and beech and oak, growing
above the chalk. His eyes swept the stream. There were old-men’s
stories of sea-monsters coming all the way up from the deep bay (which
would some day be the English Channel). But the surface of the river
was undisturbed. He scanned the farther shore. There were still a few
of the low-browed ogres from whom Tork’s people had taken this land,
but Tork knew that he could outrun or outswim them. And there were none
of them in sight, either.
All was quiet. Tork grew curious, and stood up on his rock. Then he saw
the ship.
It was an ovoid of polished, silvery metal. It was huge, two hundred
feet by three hundred, and it floated tranquilly a hundred yards above
the tree-tops. It moved to the stream, and then drifted smoothly in a
new direction up the river. It was going to pass directly over Tork’s
head.
It was so strange as to be unthinkable, and therefore it smote Tork
with a terror past expression. He froze into a paralytic stillness,
staring up at it. It made no sound. It had no features. Its perfectly
reflecting sides presented to Tork’s dazed eyes a distorted oval
reflection of the river and the stream-banks and the cliffs and all the
countryside for many miles around. He did not recognize the reflection.
To him it seemed that the thing’s hide was mottled, and that the
mottlings shifted in a horrifying fashion.
It floated on, unwavering, as if its mass were too great to be affected
by the gentle wind. Tork stood frozen in the ultimate catalepsy of a
man faced with terror neither to be fought or fled from. He did not see
the small, spidery frameworks built out from the shining hull. He did
not see the tiny tubes moving this way and that, as if peering. He did
not see several of the tubes converging upon him. He was numbed, dazed.
Nothing happened. The silver ovoid swam smoothly up above the river.
Presently the river curved, and the ship from Antares went on
tranquilly above the land. A little later it rose to clear a range of
low hills. Later still, it vanished behind them.
* * * * *
When he recovered, Tork swam ashore with his fish, shouting
vaingloriously that there was nothing to be afraid of. Heads popped
timorously into view. Children appeared first, then grown-ups. One-Ear
appeared last of all, with his red-rimmed eyes and whiskery truculence.
There were babblings. Then--they died down. The cave-folk could not
talk about the thing. They had no words for it. There were no
precedents, however far-fetched, to compare it with. They babbled of
their fright, but they could not talk about its cause.
In an hour, it appeared to have been forgotten. Tork cooked his fish.
When his belly was quite full, a young girl named Berry stopped
cautiously some yards away from him. She was at once shy and bold.
“You have much fish,” she said, with a toss of her head.
“Too much,” said Tork complacently. “I need a woman to help eat it.”
He looked at her. She was most likely One-Ear’s daughter, but she was
slim and curved and desirable where he was bloated and gross and
bad-tempered. An interesting, speculative idea occurred to Tork. He
grinned tentatively.
She said, “One-Ear smelled your fish. He sent me to get some. Shall I
tell him he is a woman if he eats it?”
Her eyes were intent; not quite mocking. Tork scowled. To let her give
such a message would be to challenge One-Ear to mortal combat, and
One-Ear was twenty years older and sixty pounds heavier than Tork. He
tossed the girl a fish, all cooked and greasy as it was.
“I give you the fish,” said Tork grandly. “Eat it or give it to
One-Ear. I don’t care!”
She caught the fish expertly. Her eyes lingered on him as she turned
away. She turned again to peer at him over her shoulder as she climbed
the ladder to One-Ear’s cave.
At just about that time the urge came to Tork. He suddenly wanted to
travel to eastward.
Travel, to the cave-folk, was peril undiluted. They had clubs and
fish-spears which were simply sharpened sticks. They had nothing else.
Wolves had not yet been taught to fear men. The giant hyena still
prowled the wild. There were cave-bears and innumerable beasts no man
of Tork’s people could hope to cope with save by climbing the nearest
tree. To want to travel anywhere was folly. To travel eastward, where a
saber-tooth was rumored to den, was madness. Tork decided not to go.
But the urge remained exactly as strong as before. He summoned pictures
of monstrous dangers. The urge did not deny them. It did not combat
them. It simply ignored them. Tork wanted to travel to the east. He did
not know why.
After half an hour, during which Tork struggled with himself, he saw
the girl Berry come out of One-Ear’s cave. She began to crack nuts for
One-Ear’s supper, using two stones. One-Ear’s teeth were no longer
sound enough to cope with nuts.
Tork looked at her. Presently an astounding idea came to him. He saw
that the girl glanced furtively at him sometimes. He made a secret
beckoning motion with his hand. After a moment, Berry got up and moved
to throw a handful of nutshells into the stream. She stood idly
watching them float away. She was only a few feet from Tork.
“I go to the east,” said Tork in a low voice, “to look for a better
cave than here.”
Her eyes flicked sidewise to him, but she gave no other sign. She did
not move away, either. Tork elaborated: “A fine cave. A deep cave,
where there is much game.”
She glanced at him again out of the corners of her eyes. Tork’s own
eyes abruptly burned. He said, greatly daring: “Then I will come and
take you to it!”
The girl tossed her head. Among the cave-folk, property-right in
females--even one’s own daughters--preceded all other forms of
possession. Were One-Ear to hear of this invasion of his proprietary
rights, there would be war to the death immediately. But the girl did
not move away; she did not laugh. Tork felt vast pride and enormous
ambition stir within him. After a long, breathless instant the girl
turned away from the water and went back to the pounding of nuts for
One-Ear. On the way her eyes flickered to Tork. She smiled a faint,
almost frightened smile. That was all.
But it was enough to send Tork off within the next half-hour with his
club in his hand and high romantic dreamings in his heart--and a quite
sincere conviction that he was moving eastward to find a cave in which
to set up housekeeping.
Because of this, the journey became adventure. Once Tork was treed by a
herd of small, piggish animals rather like the modern peccary. Once he
fled to the river and dived in because of ominous rustlings which meant
he was being stalked by something he didn’t wait to identify. And when,
near nightfall, he picked a tree to sleep in, and started to climb it,
he was halfway up to its lowest branch when he saw the ropelike
doubling of the thickness of a slightly higher branch. He got down
without rousing the great serpent, and went shivering for three
miles--eastward--before he chose another tree to sleep in. But before
he went to sleep he arranged these incidents into quite heroic form,
suitable to be recounted to Berry.
* * * * *
Tork went on at sunrise. He paused once to stuff himself with
blackberries--and left that spot via nearby trees when something
grunting and furry charged him. In mid-morning he heard a far-away,
earth-shaking sound that could come from nothing but saber-tooth
himself. Then he heard a curious popping noise that he had never heard
before, and the snarl ceased abruptly. The hair fairly stood up on
Tork’s head. But the urge to move eastward was very strong indeed now.
It seemed to grow stronger as he traveled. No other creatures seemed to
feel it, however. Squirrels frisked in the trees. Once he saw a
monstrous elk--the so-called Irish elk--whose antlers had a spread of
yards. The monster looked at him with a stately air and did not flee.
Tork was the one who gave ground, because the cave-folk had no missile
weapons save stones thrown by hand. He made a circuit around the great
beast.
Then he abruptly ran into tumbled ground, where there were practically
no trees but very many rocks. It would be a perfect place for
lying-in-wait. Also he saw the mouths of several very promising caves.
If the urge had not become uncontrollably strong, he would have stopped
to investigate them. But he went on. Once his sensitive nostrils
smelled carrion, mingled with the musky animal odor of a great
carnivore. Mentally he went into gibbering terror. In his mind he fled
at top speed. But the urge was incredibly strong. He went on like
someone possessed. He had freedom to dodge, to creep stealthily, to
take every precaution for silence and to avoid the notice of the
animals which had no need to fear one club-armed man. He could even
run--provided he fled to eastward. It was no longer possible for him to
turn back.
The urge continued to strengthen. After some miles he became an
automaton--a blank-faced gangling figure, sun-bronzed and partly clad
in an untanned hide. He carried a club and in his belt there was a
sharpened stick which was his idea of a fish-spear. He trudged onward,
his eyes unseeing, automatically adjusting his steps to the ground,
apathetically moving around great masses of stone in his way. He was,
for a time, completely at the mercy of any carnivore which happened to
see him.
He did not even falter when he saw the great, silvery ovoid which had
passed over his head the day before. He marched toward it with glassy
eyes and an expressionless face. Yet the shape was vastly more daunting