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.He would risk any danger, give his lifegladly.This he vowed, and he would tell the three heroes this, not inwords, but in his every action from this moment on.“How—how long—?” he struggled out thickly.“We don’t know.This is the time of all-dark, but this year therewill be no Spring thaw, no green buds to peep out of the black soil,no fish leaping in the mountain streams, Tapiola’s birds will notsing.There will be no Midsummer’s all-sun festival of singing anddancing.Ei.Only the storms and the ice creeping down from the topof the world and the bottom of the world until the two ice floescrash.By this time everything on our small green world will bedead.All of its waking dreams, its struggles out of the sea and intothe forests, will have been for naught.The shaggy ones to the southof our Northland may burrow themselves in their caves deep as theycan, but Louhi’s cold will find them and slay them.Soon, all toosoon, this world and all of our sun’s worlds will be only cold blueice stones flinging themselves around a sun whose power to give lifehas been stripped away by star-demon’s sorcery!”Wayne roved his chilled mind back to his boyish vid-lessons ofTerra.Yes! He saw it all again; he felt the clutching terror that thosespurious pictures, dramatically contrived to tug an offworlder boy’sheart.First the bubbling masses.Then the creatures moving withinthe depths of the warm oceans.Then the shambling, stalkinglizards, Tyrannus Rex with his slavering razor-tooth jaws.Then thecold.The creeping cold.Just as Wainomoinen said.The greatglaciers moving relentlessly down toward the equator.Themonsters were shaggy mammoths now, and soon they, too, wouldvanish with the rest.The Ages of Ice! Unexplained.Mysterious.A whimpering exodusinto eternity…Louhi! Louhi of Pohyola!“But—”“Yes, son?”“It didn’t happen!” he cried fiercely.“It didn’t!”“No? Tell this to the starving villagers.Go outside and cry outinto the sky that the light is still there, that the dark is not uponus!”Wayne flushed, winced.“Don’t you see? Don’t any of youunderstand? I’m here—from far in the future! Terra’s future! Ourworld didn’t die.It survived.It went on and on—greater andgreater—until it splashed far out into the stars!”The heroes exchanged glances.Wayne saw that they neededconvincing and lots of it.He painted a lively picture of an Earthbeyond their imagining; of the hundreds of Levels, of the Deep Fleet,of the thousand star colonies wrested by force and All-Kill, of thetechnical supremacy that made Terra top-dog in all the galaxy,until the Mephiti—It was the copper-beard, Ilmarinen, who silenced him with awrathful bear-growl.“Enough! We will hear no more of this Hüsi’sblasphemy.I for one do not believe a word of it.”“Nor I,” agreed Lemminkainen.“Louhi could take lessons fromsuch a world.”Wayne groaned and gave up.They refused to understand.Theywere stupid primitives, for all their giant’s muscles and heroicposturings.He turned to find Wainomoinen’s blue eyes studyinghim sharply.“Ei.It is you who does not understand, son’s son.Your mind hasknown so much of machinery that it is a machine itself, incapable ofadmitting what does not click into each proper slot.” He silencedWayne’s bursting protest with an uplifted hand and a furrowedscowl.“I know that you are pained by what you are forced to do inyour world.But has it occurred to you that this is because you areyoung? You will come around to the general mode of thought,presently.You will.” He nodded and sighed.“Nol”“Yes.” There was sudden sadness in the kingly planes, replaced asquickly by a thoughtful frown.“Perhaps, after all, that is why Ukkosent you to help us!”“How could such a frightful regimen of kill-training help?”Ilmarinen asked.“Because that is what the Witch of Pohyola understands.Herrovings in the loom of time, her dealings with strange creaturesbeyond space, have put her out of our reach.”Wayne nodded, gratified.“With Ilmarinen’s help I can make theVanhat some terrible weapons which—”“No,” Wainomoinen said.“Ussi artifacts are useless against suchevil as Louhi’s.No.It isn’t with his destructive machines thatyoung Waino will help us.It is rather—” He broke off brusquely,touching his forehead then his heart in an odd gesture.Wayne read the gesture and felt a chill of self-contempt skitteralong his spine.When Lemminkainen and Ilmarinen both turnedcool stony looks on him he knew that they understood his part inthe witch-battle, too.Not blasters.Not gaseous clouds of all-kill.No.Rather, the cynical cunning of the prowler through tracklessspace, the predator, the world-killer.Wayne had come among themto fight fire with fire, evil with evil.He must circumvent Louhi theWitch-Hag the way these three heroes could not, with thecorruption in his mind…Wayne fell into the village life, damped as it was under a sunlesssky, as a hand slips into a well-worn glove.In spite of his allegedsuper-sophistication, he felt that he belonged.He welcomed thescant meals, the foraging, the burrowing through icy drifts todistribute provisions and do what could be done for the sick, theendless numbing cold—like a flagellant welcomes the knotted whip.Wainomoinen’s patient teachings of wizardry that might save himin a crisis, Lemminkainen’s trips with him into the nearby forest forfood and fuel, Ilmarinen’s instructions in supernal smithery, all ofthis made him forget his gnawing belly and, for a time, the doomthat had overtaken the planet.“I still don’t understand,” he told his chief mentor, on one of theirrounds to parcel out meager amounts of grain and smoked fish.“How can it happen?” he demanded.“It didn’t happen! The Earthdid not die!”“Did it not?” Wainomoinen countered wryly.“Is it that youhave seen the whole of Ilmatar’s weaving? Is it that the patterncannot be changed—or that there is only one pattern, after all? Notan infinite number, at the Creatrix’s mood and whim?”Wayne gaped.“Many patterns! Worlds of if!”“Nün.” Wainomoinen stopped to caress an emaciated child witheyes like saucers and a middle puffed by hunger.“And if it did nothappen in our pattern here, did not someone with hero’s bloodprevent it? Things do not just ‘happen’ nor do they ‘not happen,’son’s son.The causes and effects, the near-misses, all of this is asubtle part of Ilmatar’s weaving [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]