The Valley of the Flame

CHAPTER XIV. RAFT CHOOSES

CRADDOCK WAS PANTING with excitement. His eyes were tired looking and weary.

"You saved the safety fuse," he said. "Maybe that's enough. If Parror's machine is a duplicate of the one we built, maybe we have a chance, even yet."

"It has to be, unless the man's a complete fool," Raft said. "But if we can stop him before he wakens the Flame, that'd be even better." He caught himself and laughed. "Parror's probably behind us, not ahead of us. If he passed through that cavern, they'd have broken his gadget too."

"Unless he knew another route," Janissa put in somberly. She tried to adjust her tattered garments, with fastidious, feline delicacy. Raft thought, watching her, even now she's half cat.

Then something quivered through the air about them, a burning shaking vibration that raced through their bodies, quickening the living flesh and was gone. A low thunder faded into silence.

White-faced, Janissa turned to Raft. Her hands went out helplessly.

"The Flame!" she said. "It—wakes!"

With a curse, Raft sprinted forward, the others at his heels. To fail now, so close to success, would be intolerable. The tunnel was miles long, it seemed.

It ended at last, though not before that warning vibration had rushed in deep thunder through them twice more. Each time the effect was stronger. Each time the force grew more vital, more alive.

Janissa fumbled at the door, searching for the key. At last, the panel slipped away and was gone.

They stepped out on a small balcony of rock, from which, a curving ramp twisted down to—to what?"

It was dark, too dark to make out details clearly. Emptiness, it seemed, stretched far out above and below them.

Yet there was light. It was too faint to be more than a hint, or else it was too far away below him. Raft leaned on that dizzy railing and stared down, down, down almost to the bottom of the world, an immeasurable gulf in which one flicker of brilliance gleamed.

But it was not vertigo that struck Raft then. It was fear.

Fear plain and simple, and reasonless. He knew that feeling.

Once, in Madagascar, he had had to go through a guard-hut where sentries were sleeping. A noise, a false move, would have meant spears through his body. He had known then that they were going to waken. He had felt it, with every bit of his mind and every inch of his skin.

Like that. Something down below, where the light was, so vitally alive that he felt himself standing on its palm.

And something more as well. It was the jungle. Or the life that makes up the jungle. Steaming, fertile Amazon forests, roaring rivers, all that teeming, tremendous life that stirs in the green moist heat of the tropics. Blind and terrible and hungry—there in the abyss burned the energy that rages in the heart of the great nebulae, the destroyer and the awakener—Curupuri!

"The Flame sleeps," Janissa breathed.

But in the depths was a distant brightening. A low sound, below the threshold of hearing almost, deepened and grew louder. It became an intolerable thunder, crashing out like the roaring birth-pains of a god.

From that gulf that dropped toward the heart of the world—far down—very far below—rose the Flame.

It expanded and lifted, a spear, a tower, a mountain of purest brilliance burning with intolerable fires. It was the essence of life. Raft felt himself, his whole body, swinging toward that kindling torch.

His mind swept toward it. His soul swung out across the abyss.

The thunder crashed deafeningly against the walls. The Flame brightened, blazed and towered—pulsing with eagerness—mad with delight—with ecstasy of living.

Beneath him, Raft saw, was a darker shape. Two shapes. The silhouette of a man, standing beside a machine that was curiously familiar.

Parror! And the device he had built from the First Race's records!

As the Flame brightened, Raft sprang toward the descending ramp. He raced down it, praying that he would be in time. That unchecked violence—Parror might not recognize the symptoms, blinded as he was with egotism—but Raft knew that the Flame was wakening uncontrolled.

The spark in the amulet had not reacted in this manner.

The galactic force of a nebula—raging unchecked in Paititi. Perhaps loosed on the whole world!

Down he raced, toward his quarry, while the fires brightened. They blazed with supernal brilliance and began to fade.The column of light slowly sank unwillingly. The thunders subsided.

Now Raft stood on the glassy, transparent floor of the cave. He looked down once, and reeled dizzily. He was standing unsupported above a gulf that dropped down to earth's burning center.

He dashed toward Parror. And Parror ran to meet him.

The light came from below, casting curious shadows on the man's face. Raft saw he was wearing one of the talon-gauntlets, snarling silently as he charged. Raft had no objection to killing Parror, but quelling the Flame was more important. He slowed, pulling the safety fuse from his belt.

"Parror!" he shouted, in the stillness as the thunders died. "Your machine's out of control! This will restrain it."

Parror did not even hear. He was lost in a berserk bloodthirst, blind and nearly insane with the demon's rage that Raft had seen before. His clawed fingers, tipped with sharp steel, slashed at Raft's face.

Raft did not duck quickly enough. His cheek was laid open, agonizing pain darting through him. The fuse spun from his grasp.

He closed with Parror or tried to. That agile body leaped out of reach. Again the claw ripped down, and again. A blaze of pain stung Raft's chest and side. Raft struck out savagely, but Parror eluded his driving fists.

Thunder crashed. The light from below brightened.

The Flame leaped from its bondage, bellowing with delight!

The fires surged up—poured up—sprang high as though trying to return to their interstellar cradle.

Again the claw reached out.

Raft felt a razor drawn across one eye, and sight was suddenly altered. Half-blinded, his cheek torn to the bone, his nose almost ripped away, he sent blow after blow at his elusive enemy.

Janissa ran in, threw herself between them.

Parror balled his fist and struck her hard and clean upon the jaw. The girl was flung back, to crumple motionless on that glassy floor.

"You taught me that, Raft," Parror purred.

Raft mouthed frenzied curses. If he could only get his hands on that smiling devil, sink his fingers into that bearded neck.

Intolerably bright blazed the Flame. The thunders raved and crashed within the cavern. This time the star-kindled fires did not sink.

Higher they rose, and higher—questing—eager. Wakening from slumber to a life beyond the conception of earthly minds!

Suddenly, amazingly, Raft could see from both eyes again. The agony in face and body was gone. The dripping of blood had stopped. He saw a look of amazement cross Parror's face.

The radiations from the Flame healed. They rejuvenated living tissue with miraculous speed. They hastened life.

Craddock's voice cried something. Raft could make out only a word or two through the thunder, but he saw Craddock, thirty feet away, running toward the distant machine. In Craddock's hand was a foot-long cylinder Raft recognized.

Raft never knew what Parror thought was happening. He saw the cat-man whirl, cry out in a thick, furious voice, and take one step after Craddock.

One step. No more. For then Raft had him.

But it was not easy. Raft had never battled a jaguar, but he was battling one now. The mad, raging fury that filled Parror had turned him into a wild beast. The eyes were all green now, blazing with hatred and blood-thirst. Writhing, struggling, gasping, the two crashed down together.

The Flame rose ever higher. The thunders were an intolerable ache drumming against Raft's skull. That shadowless, inter-galactic light burned into his brain.

The claw tore at his face, and instantly the wounds healed.

Snarling, as helpless in the grip of murder-lust as Parror himself, Raft surged to his knees, with an effort not even his enemy's strength could resist. Nothing existed, for a flashing, crimson second, but that red-stained claw.

He caught Parror's arm in a judo grip, and broke it with savage fury.

For a moment he held the man motionless. That was enough. The power of the Flame healed bone and tissue, but Parror's wrist and lower arm jutted out at an impossible angle.

But he fought on, with teeth and nails and feet, though Raft's fingers were clawed deep into his throat. Inexorably, with the blind savagery of his kind, he fought on until not even the Flame could bring life back to his strangled body.

Then Raft looked up.

Far across the cavern stood the machine on its tripod, perilously close to the Flame itself. And moving painfully toward it, like a man breasting a strong wind, was Craddock.

Craddock?

Something about that shape made Raft catch his breath. The outline was altering even as he watched. Raft remembered Craddock's maimed hands, and the power that had destroyed them, the same star-born energy that now thundered through the cavern in burning ecstasy of awareness.

The figure still gripped the fuse-cylinder.

Raft got to his feet. He began to run after Craddock, but the distance was too great. Nearly at the machine now, the figure was fantastic.

It was not Craddock. It was not even human any more.

The living flesh boiled and altered and flowed under the monstrous force that could create whole universes. Something utterly inhuman, at last, stumbled and dragged itself forward into the full blaze of the radiation.

And yet there was a human purpose.

It reached the machine. For an instant it crouched there, adjusting the fuse. Beyond it, Curupuri shouted in cataclysmic fury as the fires poured torrentially up from the abyss. One instant of utter madne'ss, while the power of universes, of galaxies, stooped and touched that cavern —

One instant—and then the thunders died.

The Flame pulsed once, twice, and sank. With a sigh almost human, the fires of life dwindled and dropped into the great gulf.

There remained, far below, a point of light, burning with unquenchable fires!

Harnessed!

The fire that had come from beyond the stars was harnessed.

Tamed—chained—by the flesh to which it had once, long ago, given life….

Janissa stirred.

Fear came into her eyes. She raised herself against Raft's supporting arm to look around questioningly. Then her gaze came back to Raft's.

"It's over, Janissa," he said. "The Flame sleeps."

"The machine is working?"

"Yes. Parror had made a duplicate of ours, after all. But he didn't have the safety fuse. Once Craddock inserted that, it worked."

"But, Craddock?"

"He's dead," Raft said quietly. "He died, I suppose, because he had to. The man who once wakened the Flame died to quell it again. This time, I think, the danger is over forever."

She watched him.

"I tested the machine," he said. "It's exactly what's needed. The First Race were right, after all. They waited too long to build their own machine, or they'd never have become monsters. Anyway, the Flame will burn, will send out its radiations, at this normal rate forever."

"Normal?"

Raft nodded. "I altered the adjustment. Not to the danger-point, but so that metabolism in Paititi will be same as metabolism in my own world. There's no barrier now. The talismans aren't necessary."

"I can live in your world? It won't be—slow?"

"Your world or mine, Janissa," he said. "You can choose." But she had chosen already. And so had Raft. He had made his decision long ago, he thought, the first time he had seen Janissa's face in the little mirror. She had drawn him across the miles into the lost land where the Flame from infinity had burned and, after all, there was no choice. What problems the future might hold could be solved, somehow.

"We need not go back through the cavern of the monsters," she said. "There is a way to reach the unseen road from here."

Raft's lips found hers.

But he was thinking: My world will be strange to you, Janissa. I will make you happy, if I can. And I think I can, for I love you.

But will you turn back, sometimes, and remember? Will you remember Paititi, and the great trees that hold up the sky? Will you remember the castle above Doirada Gulf, where the white cloud from the cataract hangs forever in the sky?

Will the heritage of the jaguar stir in your blood, Janissa, to memories I cannot share? Or will you find contentment in my world?

Silently Raft let Janissa guide him toward the way that led to freedom, and to a destiny he could not foretell. But the girl's hand lay warm in his, and that, for the while, was enough of an answer for them both.