Part 1

WERWILE OF THE CRYSTAL CRYPT

By GARDNER F. FOX

His black science threatened the whole cosmos. Against him frail Princess Nuala thrust her ancient knowledge--but he sneeringly smashed that. And space-toughened Clark Travis stood by helplessly. Of what use here was a pair of ready fists?

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

He should have known better. He admitted that, now. Listening to the spacemen in Trixon and Cleg would have saved his skin. They told him that Flormaseron was a hellhole where Creation had run mad. The only thing was, even they hadn't known how bad it was. Clark Travis worked the walnut stud of his _stil_ disintegrator hopefully, but when it sputtered he gave it up.

The arklings were coming for him. Through the opening in the stone traceries of the ancient doorway, he saw the red aura that floated over them as they came up the stone ramp. Clark turned and ran along the sloping floor, down into the black, labyrinthine windings of the ancient city. His spacebooted feet made soft, slapping sounds. His beamlight cast a white brilliant glow ahead of him. He ran past several intersecting corridors before he skidded around a corner into one.

Clark Travis lost himself in the ruins. He went down into the bowels of this city that was in its glory before the Earth had been more than a spinning ball of fire in space. He saw odd animals carved in the walls, queerly human things at work on ships and weapons, tall men and lovely women etched in bas-relief in the marble.

The deeper down he went, the more he was putting himself in the arklings' power. They were familiar with this rotting pile of masonry, where the tunnels were dark strips out of Hades. Their red aura lighted the winding passageways. Clark only had his beamlight for the blackness.

He snapped off the power, stood waiting. His breath came softly. The tunnels were black, as black as space itself; as black as Martin Kent's eyes had been when he first told him about Flormaseron and the sleeping goddess of the crystal crypt.

"She isn't a goddess, of course," Kent had said, seriously. "She's the last remnant of the first race that ever came into existence. The product of a million generations of culture and scientific knowledge. When the disaster struck at her people, the chief scientists encased her in a block of crystal and hid her somewhere on Flormaseron. She's still there--and still alive.

"Think of it, Clark! A woman with the knowledge of such a race. Before they enclosed her, they thought-fed her brain with knowledge, and so arranged the crystal that during all the years of her interment, she would learn! A brain like that--why it would revolutionize our own culture. The Earth'd go millions of years ahead in science, if we could only find her--and bring her back to life!"

Travis had said, "If she's entombed on a hellhole like Flormaseron, how'd you ever hear of her?"

Martin Kent took Travis by the arm, led him out the door of his office and into the museum corridor. Here in Solar Museum, Mars Division, Kent was absolute ruler. Behind him he had the billions of credits that Earth and Mars and Venus poured into their cultural endeavors. From all over the solar system Solar brought stuffed animals, crumbling bricks from ancient cities, rusted weapons that experts studied and reconstructed in glittering _stil_.

They walked past a panoramic window of a Venusian sea-bottom and into a narrow room that held a safe inset in its east wall. Kent put the flat of his hand on the lock, and waited. A deep humming throbbed from behind the glistening metal wall. The huge door swung open.

Kent reached in and brought out a tiny vial of green metal. He unscrewed the lid, withdrew a folded scroll. "It's all here, Clark. Stylogrammed on flexible metal. It's ages old. One of our field parties came across it in a dried sea-bed on Clex. It puzzled us a long time, until Fielding came across a key to the writing, and translated it."

Travis turned the metallic paper over, looked at the queerly graceful writing. He looked at Kent inquiringly.

Kent smiled, "Well, what do you say? I'd go myself if I were younger. And, if it didn't cost so much, I'd send a field party. But it's a gamble, and the Board probably wouldn't agree to spending credits on it. But one man could go. One man--like you."

Travis grinned. He was tall and saturnine, brown with the heat of many suns. His body had been hardened on the deserts of Proxima Centauri, and under the seas of Venus.

Kent went on, "You're the best archaeologist I know. You've been in tight spots before. You can fight, if you have to. A thing like trouble is an old friend to you."

Travis remembered the polyps in the Venusian water-caves where he'd almost lost an arm before he got past them to bring the museum the only specimen of the primal undine race of Venus ever seen above the sea-mists. He had found a petrified boat on Sirius' third planet, to prove that at one time there had been seas on that baked potato of a planet. But for the last six months he had moped around Mars Port, studying alluvial deposits, wishing for something to take him and his equipment out into the star-paths again.

"I'll go, Mart. And if you'd only shaved this morning I might kiss you for the chance!"

Kent laughed and waved a hand. "Order what you need. I guess the museum can afford a few thousand credits, considering your record--even on such a gamble."

* * * * *

Travis took his spaceboat out from Mars to Titan, and then on to Proxima Centauri. He asked questions in taverns and study halls. He heard of the _arklings_, of the ruined cities and temples. He heard of the _arklings'_ hate for strangers. But Travis didn't scare easily. He checked his weapons and equipment, tossed in an extra case of _safusas_-wine and waved a farewell.

In the darkness he tried to grin and failed. He could hear them coming, at a distance. Their queer _slip-pat_ footsounds carried a long way. He couldn't tell just how far away they were.

Travis went on, into the darkness.

The light came suddenly, as he rounded a bend in the tunnel. It was milky-red, like the ancient ko-yao porcelains, delicately flushed and tinted. It shook as a veil might in a breeze. It bellied and leaped. It sent its streamers into the blackness and lighted up the tunnel.

There was a queer menace about the light, a beating like the breath of an angry Sindri, Venus-god of fire. It came in little pinkish puffs. There was no heat, only that overbearing menace. Through the pink light, Travis thought he saw queerly shaped forms standing still and brooding. There was a series of cones, and huge globes that seemed to float in an orbit--

He did not hear the _slip-pat_ until too late. A hairy body landed on his shoulders and he pitched to his knees on the eon-old stone floor. As he fell he whirled and brought his _stil_-gun up. It was empty, but the long, ringed barrel sideswiped the _arkling's_ face and knocked him away.

Travis got to his feet as the others hurtled at him. Giant hands that were smooth-palmed and hairy-backed hasked at his arms and leather space-harness. He slammed fists at the faces revealed by the floating red aura over them. He tried to use footwork, but the space was too narrow. It was kill or be killed, and he just didn't have the strength to stop them.

A palm caught him on the ear and sent his head ringing like a carrillon tower. A fanged mouth fastened on his thigh, biting deep. Another hand raked at his naked arm and gouged out flesh.

Travis leaped for them, hoping to run over their bodies and go back up the tunnel faster than they could follow. But a big _arkling_ rose up from the pack and swung a flat hand. The blow caught him on his chest, sent him reeling and sickened, back and back--

The _arklings_ cried out just as the pink light swept up all around Travis. The menace was unbearable as he fell back and into the pale barrier. It bathed him and whispered to him and threatened him with queer and maddening ways to die. It caught him in its tenuous folds and held him there, cradled, as the voices told him of a water-death that took eleven years, each year more painful than the last; they gloated over a spit and a fire of red coals that cooked a man over a space of months; they whimpered, themselves scarcely daring to think of the barbaric tortures of Rudra the eternal....

A cool something touched his forehead. Travis tried to focus his eyes through the subtle distortions of the pink mists. He saw the twin blue pools at first, and then the yellow shower of hair graced with the triangular headgear blazing with jewels. The blue pool were her eyes, and they were wide and open, and filled with a wisdom that made Travis shudder deep in his guts.

And yet, there was a _fear_ in those blue eyes, too.

She wore a transparent film with a slender golden thong looped at her middle. She murmured, "You are Clark Travis, an Earth-thing. You came to kidnap me. Yes. And the _arklings_ have harmed you."

The woman turned and stared toward the tunnel. A white hand fumbled at her girdle, drew out a pencil-thin rod of metal. She went away from Travis and stepped into the tunnel. Travis tried to watch her, but the pain of his wounds, and the ringing in his temples bothered his eyes. There was a terrific green flare that tinted the pale pink light--

And silence.

Travis knew the _arklings_ were just so much powder drifting from tunnel ceiling and wall.

The woman came back, seeming to float through the light. She brooded at him with her wise eyes. Travis could read the fear in them more distinctly, now.

* * * * *

She put out a hand and closed her warm fingers on his. She led him through the beams of pink light and into white brilliance, into a room that he had beheld briefly through the pink mists from the tunnel. The cone-towers were there, grouped by threes around the room. And the globes that rotated lazily overhead in orbits were fiery with golden luminescence. They warmed Travis as they floated.

In the middle of the room lay a huge crystal, scooped hollow by some long-dead artisan. It had indentations and mounds in it. Travis realized it was carved with exact care to fit a reclining body. From the walls of the crystal calyx stemmed thin golden wires, reaching across to the cones. And against the wall, humming and throbbing, were the dynamos and engines that fed the cones.

"I am Nuala," the girl said in her silvery voice. "I am of the Nekkalad, the first humanoid race in our universe. I have been encased in the calyx for eons. Unrememberable eons. I have seen the rise and fall of your planet, and the fall of others. I have seen--"

She broke off, shuddering.

Travis said wonderingly, "You look so young. If it weren't that Martin Kent told me about you, I'd--"

She let him look at her, standing with her eyes lowered. Travis had seen the _landuli_, the dancing girls raised by the princes of Orion-3; had seen the white-tressed houris of Venus; had seen the golden women bred for men's pleasure by the Kafars of Proxima Centauri. He had never seen anyone as lovely as this first woman. Her legs were long and white, her hips gently rounded. The high arch of her breasts were poetry.

And then she raised her lashes.

Her blue eyes were ancient as space itself, as filled with nameless knowledge, with wisdom beyond Travis's understanding. They had beheld all things, from the slug that came out of a borning world's ocean bottom to the scribblings of the universe's mightiest scientist. Her ears had heard the songs of Sull and the symphonies of Bach and Lyrn.

Travis was aware of all that staring into her eyes. He whispered, "But--how?"

She gestured at the calyx and the wires. "Those machines feed me energy that I need to stay alive. They also feed me the intellectual stimulation I need to stay sane.

"Man's thoughts can be recorded. You know that. Therefore they give off some electrical flow. I will not go into the whys of it. You would not understand. But those electrical flows never die. They fade and fade, almost to nothingness--but not quite. The dynamos here pick them up, amplify them.

"Here in the crystal calyx I have been fed all thought since the Werwile smashed Flormaseron. I spent years with a being called the Discoverer--before he disappeared into some strange twisting of the space-time continuum. It was he who warned me of Rudra, the Werwile. He said he was stirring--about to come again."

Travis muttered, "The Werwile?"

The girl laughed softly at his puzzled face. "The Werwile, yes. The eternal one. He who never sleeps. He who knows all things. Your race calls him Devil ... a race-memory of the first beginnings of the humanoid cell, of the one who smashed the first race just when it was rising to its glory. All your legends, all the legends of all men contain mention of him. The Rebel. Loki. Venus's Badal. Cygni's Daldal."

"You mean, there is someone like that? An actual person?"

"Why not? Your race has dreamed of immortality. So has every race. The Werwile found it."

Travis hooked his thumbs in the metal loops of his space-harness and waited. Nuala walked about the big chamber, touching a glittering cone, staring up at a whirling golden globe.

She went on, "He found it, smashed his own people in a holocaust of destruction, and went into another cosmos. Now he is coming back. The irony of it is that he hollowed out this crystal crypt himself--and it was here he built his own evil knowledge. My people put me here, thinking he would never return...."

Travis chuckled, "What can one man do to worry you?"

She looked at him, and her contempt was as tangible as a slap across the face. "You are a child. Just a baby. You don't dream of the sciences that Rudra will employ. He can sweep your Earth-empire ahead of him as a breeze takes a dry leaf. Look about you. See the cones, the globes, and ask yourself--can your science duplicate them? And then ask, if Rudra, the Werwile, smashed a civilization that could produce all this, what will he do against Earth?"

The fear in the blue eyes touched Travis then, under the leather of his belt. His stomach tightened. Nervously, he licked at his dry lips. He thought of Mars Port, of New York Terminal, of the giant spacers that plied the starways throughout the System, of the jewels and food and riches they carried in their holds. He thought of his Iowa home, of his parents. He visualized that culture, those people, all smashed.

He whispered, "What can we do?"

Nuala shrugged white shoulders. "Nothing. If Rudra smashed the Nekkalad, what can your Earth-people do?"

"We can fight!" Travis grated.

She was amused. "How?"

"We could attack him, before he suspects. He does not know that we know. A little surprise might turn the trick."

The pain of his wounds made him dizzy, but it seemed to Travis that Nuala opened her eyes in surprise. She gloomed at him long moments, a white-fingered hand toying with the golden hemp of her girdle. She murmured softly, "Surprise? Yes, a sudden attack might work. If we could get past the barbarians who guard him, there is something we might do."

Her face grew blurred in his eyes. He saw her as through a mist. He was falling away from her, dropping. She cried out in alarm, ran toward him. Her soft hands caught him, but could not hold his big body. He hit the floor and lay still.

* * * * *

There was perfume in his nostrils, and a faint murmur of sound. Travis opened his eyes, lay staring up at the white ceiling of the crystal crypt. He turned his neck, saw Nuala with oddly-shaped jars set before her on a long, flat tabletop.

She was murmuring, "If only I were sure of the cell formation, it would be easy. Not like ours, yet different from that of the _arklings_. This ... yes, this might be the right one."

She came toward him a blue jar grooved and opaque in her hand. Smiling at him, she unscrewed the top and dipped her fingers inside. She brought out a reddish jelly that she smoothed gently into the bite in his thigh, then into the torn flesh of his arm. There was faint pain, a tingle of nausea.

"It will pass," said Nuala. "The red jelly is _celluvalin_. It is--you might call it plastic flesh. It has the cell formation of blood and sinew, and will knit and unite with the torn sections of your body."

Travis lay still. The pain was going swiftly. Tentatively he flexed his leg. It moved easily. He grinned, "You could make a fortune with that on Earth or Mars. What the Fleet wouldn't give for plastic flesh. Whew!"

Nuala sighed and replaced the jars. "If we defeat Rudra, I will return to the calyx. There is no place in the world for me."

Travis saw the blue eyes and the tiredness, the wisdom and knowledge behind them, and bit at his lip. She was right. Earth and Mars, even Cyngi and Lalande-80 would be boring to her. She knew too much to be happy with anyone less intelligent than she. And that meant everyone--except the Werwile.

Travis swung his long legs in their torn spaceslacks off the table. He ran his hands over the broad leathern belt that held his _stil_-gun and holster, over the leather-and-cloth jerkin with the ripped sleeves.

"Guess I'm ready to go. I feel good again. But I'd like to stay that way. Do you have another of those pencil-things?"

He pointed at her girdle. She drew out the weapon and smiled, "You mean the displacer. It forces the electrons of an object out of their orbit. Turns them into other orbits, and makes them dust."

She went to a drawer, drew out three of the pencil-guns, and handed them to him. "You will be safe with these."

Nuala went to the pink barrier and beckoned to him. "Hurry. The sooner we surprise Rudra, the better."

The _arklings_ left them strictly alone. They went up through the tunnels, past the carven walls to the ruins of the Nekkalad temples. Sprawled across acres of the barren, pitted surface of the planet, the white towers and jagged walls of the once-massive buildings were like huge play-things scattered by a child-giant in petulant anger.

Nuala breathed, "Before Rudra came and smashed them, they were the loveliest things in all the universe."

The silvered hull of Travis's spacer lay a hundred yards from the crumbled wall, on a bed of powdered black rock. Nuala walked around it, frowning. She shook her head, her long yellow hair fluttering about her shoulders.

"It will never make the trip. There are things to be done to it."

She looked at him, troubled. She asked, "Do you know what a Calakin curvature-annihilator is? Or a Wilwal warping-beam?"

Travis shook his head.

Nuala said, "I will have to make them, then. You do have a workshop, I know. I read your thoughts as you came toward Nekkalad. Even before that, in Mars Port with Martin Kent."

She went up the metal ladder into the ship. She walked with calm assurance toward the repair room. Travis came after her, wondering, a little rattled. It was odd to see a woman so familiar with his life, with his own inner thoughts. He thought of Jonquilon, the red-headed dancer at Mars Port. Cheeks red, he settled himself on a bench, and watched her.

* * * * *

Nuala was murmuring, "We'll need a speed-up job on your rockets to get them through the Break. And a super-blaster to add to your own space-warper. Hmm ... wires all right. Sheet metal not too strong, but it'll do...."

Her voice droned on. Travis found himself lost in contemplation of her. She looked like any girl you might see in the Chez Saturn or Planetary Park. She might be fussing over a jalanadon steak instead of a space-warper. If it weren't for her eyes ... so blue ... but so filled with that frightening knowledge, with wisdom, she'd make a guy a swell wife. He wondered how she kissed.

"Now you must help me," she said, turning to him. She saw his abrupt change of expression and brooded at him. She shook her head suddenly and held out a small engine rigged with wheels and wires, with armatures and generator. "Attach it to the drive shaft, ahead of the combustion chambers."

She showed him how, and explained its working. Travis didn't get the whole thing, but he understood enough to know that even the Chalmers rockets would be improved with this contraption. It smoothed the blastings of the jets, built them up on their own power. The ship would be like a bullet that, once shot from the gun, would receive another firing every ten feet. It was speed added to speed.

Nuala smiled at his blank look, "Don't bother about whys and wherefors. Just let me handle things."

* * * * *

Travis grumbled under his breath, cramped under the jets and installing the super-blaster. It fretted his male pride to feel that a woman--even such a woman as Nuala--knew more about the workings of his own space-ship than he knew himself.

He hit a Litson wrench against a fitting in anger. "All this talk of Rudra. The eternal werwile! Blah! How do I know there _is_ any such person?"

The thought stopped him. He lay there in the cramped space between jet-sheathing and baffles and grinned at his own stupidity. "How do I know she's the one I came out here to find, even? I never saw her in the calyx!" Deep in the heart of him, he knew that Nuala was--Nuala. Her eyes told him that. He muttered, "Just the same, I don't have any proof about this werwile!"

He crawled out of the rocket-room and stood up in the narrow corridor, wiping sweat from his eyes. Under his feet the floor quivered as the rockets thundered into life. Travis put a calloused hand on a wall-rail. The rockets blasted faster, turning the corridor into a maelstrom of sound.

The ship was lifting, leaving the blackened planet and the ruined temples far below it. There was a sudden weightlessness to his body that told him they were out in space, now, slipping along with vertiginous speed.

He clanked the lock on the rocket-chamber door and went to find Nuala.

She was bent over the control panel, moving her white fingers across the dials. She did not look up when he came to a stop beside her. She merely said, "I'll have to take this all apart. Your wiring system is only 87 per cent efficient."

"That's pretty good," Travis rasped, "On the first trampers that went to the moon, 35 per cent was hot stuff."

Nuala sniffed and reached for a kit of tools. Travis put out a hand and closed it on her wrist. She looked up at him from under long yellow eyelashes.

"How do I know there _is_ a Rudra?" he said harshly. "How do I know you aren't just using me for ... for...."

"For what?" she asked serenely, not moving to draw her wrist away. "Where in all your worlds would I want to go? I know everything there is to know about them--and you."

"Even--Jonquilon?"

She let amusement reach up through the blue of her eyes. She mocked him gravely, "I know about that weekend you spent with her, when you let the museum get scooped on the canal-men bones on Mars."

Travis let her hand go. He grumbled, "It was worth it."

Her laughter was like silver droplets. She mocked, "What do you know about women? Have you ever seen the water-girls on Tasselas, or the bubble-women that float in the Magellanic cluster? I could show you ways of--"

She broke off and shook herself. She said dryly, "I'm letting my emotions run away with me. I can't do that with the werwile. And, speaking of him--you ask proof, do you?"

Nuala shrugged. "I really can't prove him to you except by showing him. Trust me for three--four days. Then you will have your proof." The fear was back in her eyes as she whispered, "You will have it then. By Grock, you will have it!"

* * * * *