Doomsday Warrior 19 - America’s Final Defense (22 page)

It was a matter manipulator, a neutrino blaster! The ancient inhabitants of the asteroid stored all they knew in the Neuro-dancer! Killov could have learned so much of art, philosophy, religion. But he cared not for knowledge. He cared only for power, for the ultimate weapon.

The killer-mind directed his will one way: to activate the ancient maximum weapon. Fate would have it that he would be the one to destroy Earth!

Gears clanked, ancient systems came alive. Linked to the unlimited mind of the Neuro-dancer, Killov summoned the neutrino blaster, willed it to activate. The deadly neutrino blaster, an antimatter, world-destroying gun, was a complex device, and only a mind-machine integration could fathom its use.

Killov was such a being! He was man, machine,
and
weapon now! He
was
the huge weapon of planet-destroying power called the neutrino blaster!

The five-hundred-foot-high world-destroyer “gun” came erupting like a demon up out of its ages-old hiding place in the floor of the pyramid. Stones fell from the ceiling of the pyramid, smashing down on everything, but not damaging the space-gun.

When the dust cleared, the sky could be seen above, a sky filled with the earth!

Killov turned his mad, bloodshot eyes upward to see his target. He started to line up the weapon for firing. It would take just a few minutes, he knew, to warm up the power, and then . . . no more Earth!

Rockson heard the thunderous noise of the pyramid being torn asunder as he was searching the desert for his men. Killov had evaporated. Intuitively, Rockson understood: it could only be Killov! He’d reached the Neuro-dancer!

Rockson staggered back toward the vast temple. He entered and saw the roof caved in, a vast cloud of debris. He rushed on and found Killov on the statue, his skull woven into the Neuro-dancer’s tendrils. But that was not all . . . the center of the blasted open pyramid held a giant space gun which pointed toward Earth. This was the most powerful weapon ever created, Rockson knew. A world-destroyer, emerging from the clouds of dust.

Killov, he knew, was no longer a mere human. He was something much more evil and powerful now. He had the power!

Rockson rushed to stop him, but a force-field bounced him away painfully. Rockson got up and steeled his mutant strength. He had to get to Killov and stop him, no matter what!

With a prayer to God, he rushed forward again and broke through the force field. He tore at Killov, struggled with him. But it was too late, even before he reached the madman. There was a sudden draw back of the twenty-story-high gun barrel of the neutrino blaster. Lightning discharges flashed.

And then came a tremendous ear-splitting concussion!

Killov had managed to fire the huge planet-destroyer weapon even as Rock’s fingers touched his enemy’s vulnerable, scrawny human neck. The madman’s black, feral eyes gleamed in victory.

Rock let go of Killov’s throat for a moment and watched the weapon’s death-beam shoot out into the sky. It spread up, heading inexorably toward Earth at thousands of miles per hour.

The black, beady orbs of the seated man lit up. “In a few minutes,” Killov laughed, “Earth will be
gone.
And nothing can stop that from happening. Nothing!” His tendril-encased face looked hideous in the lightning flashes created by the weapon’s beam-discharge of potential. The expression on the skull-man’s face was of ultimate ecstasy! Perhaps this was the only orgasm the evil genius had ever had in his entire life.

Rock snarled, “If it’s the end of the world you want, you’ll not live to see it!” He tightened his fingers about Killov, strangled Killov until he heard a snap, until his fingers were blood-drenched. And then the beam of death headed toward Earth just evaporated.

The Earth was
not
destroyed. It was still there, in the sky!!

Rockson’s men all appeared and rushed up around the Doomsday Warrior. “We were blown a mile away somehow,” Chen explained.

“Rock! We saw the beam go up toward Earth, then stop,” Detroit exclaimed. “Why is the Earth still there? I don’t understand.”

After a moment, Rockson let go of Killov’s throat. He said softly, “I think Earth is not destroyed because the Neuro-dancer is more or less a dream-becomes-reality device. It’s the dream that stuff is made of. When Killov died, the dream he had of the destruction of Earth died with him.”

“So,” Chen said. “It’s over at last. What do we do with Killov’s body?”

“Leave it here,” Rock said. “This world is for the dead.”

Slowly they moved away from the wide-staring, emaciated corpse and left the pyramid. With half-glazed looks on their faces, Rockson and his men headed back toward the saucer, remembering old friends, remembering old times.

They would not all return from this mission.

Some of Earth’s finest would forever remain on this tiny world that traveled solo through the lonely universe.

It would be their cemetery; it would be theirs forever.

Epilogue

A
Thousand Years Later:
Rebirth.

The woman stood naked among the fruited trees in the windswept, honey-scented May orchard, her long blond tresses tossing in the snapping air. She was motionless, as if rooted, yet she was not a tree. She was smooth of flesh and very human, despite her treelike trance. Her arms extended at shoulder height to her sides like tree limbs. Her nude legs were close together. She imagined she was another of the apple trees, that she was a great and powerful apple tree, and the world about her—sunny rolling hills, the tall waving grass, the second-growth brush beyond the farm—all agreed. She truly was an apple tree, perhaps the best one on Karrak.

They accepted her as she was, an apple tree of flesh. And
oh
how she loved to just stand rooted and silent like the other trees, feeling the sun bringing life through her forehead leaves and down to her wet lips, down through her throat and chest, through her torso and sturdy legs.

She wished she could stay there all night as well as all day, but she had children. They were waiting down below, in the valley, laughing and playing in the candysong afternoon. They would tire of playing with the others. Her children would call her soon.

The last sun rays licked at her toes, those toes that so much wanted to be roots, deep, seeking roots, jutting down to the black source of life. “When I am old,” the woman-apple-tree thought, “I shall be all gnarled and twisted, and happy to still bear fruit. I will be willing to lose branches in a storm, to be able to look lifeless in the winter, to be able to sprout from the wrong places on my bark in the summer, leaving the dead branches until midsummer’s flickering fire heat to fall off. I will be happy to be among them, I
will
be a tree . . . someday.”

But now the voices of the others were calling her to tend her children. She slowly lowered her outstretched arms to her side. She turned her face down into the valley, and her face lost some of its blazing radiance. Slowly she lifted first one root foot and then the other. Her slender feet brushed the soft strands of wild grass,
swish, swish,
as she walked downhill. She became a buxom, naked human woman of bronze skin, of tight torso and precise hips. She was the Pruzac, the ruler of life and death on reborn Karrak.

They saw her coming; it was always beautiful to watch her descend the hill. They’d accepted her as just another tree when she stood still. But when she moved, they knew her humanity. The people of Karrak knew nothing more.

For her part she was aware of their intense, touching stares, the looks caressing the nape of her neck, touching her firm, upturned breasts and pink nipples, sliding up and down her sun-warmed thighs as she began running down the hill.
Ah,
they thought, what universal rhythms her breasts count out as she runs, what changing, always harmonious, always perfect rhythms. She is beauty itself, they thought, each in his or her way: why does she want to be a tree? Why does she not bed, like other women, with the men?

The tree woman was racing now; she knew where the rocks were hidden in the grass and where they weren’t, and she threw herself into the race. She ran faster and faster, as fast as she could.

Her children stopped playing and laughed as they saw their mother running. She was so lean and fast, her hair haloed against the descending sun. They heard the
slap, slap
of the beautiful tree-woman’s feet on the squishy ground getting louder. And then the children heard her fast, regular breathing, the little sounds of the yielding grass, and then they were swept up by her arms. They laughed in the woman’s arms. The tree-woman was still running. She slung the children under her arms, and continued running through the primitive settlement, and out the other side of it. The laughing children knew she was going down to the immense sea to watch for
him.

The others in the valley, the normal ones, went back to doing what they were doing with their wood and mud, stones and straw. The villagers sighed en masse, thinking that the apple tree woman must eat wild things, perhaps roots and grasshoppers. They knew she didn’t really have the sun feed her. But on cold, dark days, they’d noticed that she was not so radiant standing up there, and she seemed to grow thinner when the storm clouds lasted all week, darkening the sky. Maybe she
was
a tree.

But the children were normal . . .

There had been one other among them a long time ago who had been as different as the apple tree woman—but he had gone away. Gone away to the sea of death.

After years of rolling in the sea at the nearby edge of the world, after years of twisting his body to the contours of the waves and turning his face up toward the sun while his fingers sought out in the sand places only he knew, he was returning. Why he had suddenly left one day, no one knew, but they were sad. They liked him, and her. They hoped the woman would stay with them because of the children, and they hoped the children would be like the woman too. For their little normal world needed the woman’s wildness, it needed the woman and the man who’d gone away. They were life itself.

The apple tree woman felt that the sea-man was near. Her body asked for him, so she carried her children to the sea.

The ocean gathered its force and the sea-man rolled with it, touched the bottom, got caught in the undertow, and then was thrown up and out of it, cast like jetsam on the shell-littered shore. Scot McCaughlin let it happen, because that’s the way he was:
yielding.
For years the man had been tossed by the waves; now he was anxious to stand, and yawn, and stretch on shore, to leave all the other sea-dead things that roamed mindlessly along the bottoms of the green, dark world of wet. So he lay still, in his soaked and algae-green toga, which was a gift of his mentor, who gave him up to this world with a
thought.
He lay there until the high tide became neap tide, and then he sat up and opened his eyes, which were caked with salt. He scraped at the eyes of sea-green with his long, yellowed fingernails until he could see . . . and what he saw disturbed him. He found the village was further from the beach than it had been when he’d left. When he’d left, there had been a big bright beach with lots of orange and tan reptiles digging in the sand right at the pyramid’s base. Those reptiles had made pleasing musical noises to indicate their eagerness to meet a mate. Now the beach was deserted, far from the town, yet full of junk, gunk, and worst of all, listless, hungry birds. He saw that the villagers had picked away most of the mussels and mollusks that had come to cover the rocks over eons. The villagers were probably hysterical at the idea that mollusks might eat his eyes, if and when he returned. Maybe it was a kindness? No . . . he had forsaken the normals for good reason. He had waited for her. She was as he—not of this world. Something had happened long ago. Something lost. He had walked to the sea then, grabbed and chewed on a seagull, spitting out feathers and swallowing its still trembling heart with savor. Because he was different. “You evil people,” he’d muttered, in-between swallowing bones and gristle. “I say that there will come a time that even lizards do not like, therefore not a good time. I say I will return then.”

Now he sensed a presence, and he whipped his sodden, seaweed-filled hair, full of snails and rot, away from his face and wiped his eyes to see her approach, for he sensed it was her.

“I see you, sea-man,” the apple-tree woman said, dropping her children on the soft sand. “I have you, as I have all the lizards, and as I have all the creatures of our once dead world. I have them all now, but you have eluded me in your wanderings on the ocean floor, in your long absence. Come to me, now.”

“I
know
you . . .” he said, “you are my past . . .”

“Yes, and your future. You will join the others within their tombs if you deny me. You will not last in this age, your time has parted, you must not linger here. Come with me.”

She
was
beautiful, he thought, but then again,
things
are always beautiful. She was the sum and substance of all the pasts, or all the lizards and all the sunny days. She was ladies in white taffeta with parasols, Indian maidens and tribal whores, desert flowers, rains and fire of long ago, another place. Yes, she was all that.

But the sea-man was slow to respond to her the way he previously had. He was too, too long gone.

He pushed himself into the sand while the woman pleaded to him to join her. “Come. It is good to return. Rebirth . . .”

He laughed and groaned at the thought, and his yellow rotted teeth, encrusted with green weeds from sea bottoms deep, spat saltwater at her. He laughed slowly, for over a thousand years would pass yet, until his body was powder, until his nose fell off and was eaten by the mussels, until his final realization! He would yet defeat her through his lack of care for beauty (for only the past is beautiful). And in that time, the bottom creatures would push their heavy black bodies up from the swill of creation, up from his thousand-year laugh. There really was no time at all, no place for things to go, no need to rush or to regret, nothing at all except water. Victorious. Only then would he return to her. Then she would come running over the dunes with her children, and he would smile at her. The underwater things would call for him to come, and she would join
his
world.