Land Beyond the Map

His senses fast slipping away, staring, the blood hammering frenziedly in his skull, Crane saw McArdle halt before the crystal screen, saw him bend, do something by the wall — saw McArdle vault lithely within the tomb, climb up to the narrow shelf behind the body of Trangor on its chair atop its shining bowl.

He knew that this moment represented McArdle’s supreme triumph. With his Earthly knowledge and the skills of the Loti. he could not fail to win the dominion of two worlds. And Crane could do nothing, pinned to the wall by the grapnel claw and the tracks of a clanking monster that haunted the dreams of his childhood.

At any moment now, McArdle would shed his Earthly body, the body of the man whose name had been McArdle, and would reenter his own body, the husk of Trangor, waiting for him. In complete despair and exhaustion, Crane closed his eyes.

The flash seared through his closed eyelids. The noise buffeted him in waves of pain-filled sound. He felt blackness shot with the lurid scarlet of eternity smash all across him — and then there existed only the blackness.

Everything stopped for Roland Crane.

Epilog

“If we share them out equally that should be fair.” And Crane nodded towards the suitcases.

“You can have as many more as you wish. It is no problem to manufacture them.” Varnat smiled and the years sloughed off him.

“Sure, and old Liam will be pleased. He must have been very vexed when those clanking horrors drove him off and me trapped in the truck.” Colla held no rancor towards his father-in-law. Crane wondered what his reactions would be when he found himself the father of the tousle-haired imp.

“We must be going.” Varnat nodded towards the spaceship in her gantry. The other Loti had boarded and only Varnat was left to say goodbye. Polly smiled at the ancient in his wondrous chair.

“Goodbye, Varnat. I’m sorry you never did tame this world. It’s a terrible place; but almost anywhere is terrible until men come and tame it and make it a place for their wives to live.”

Allan Gould walked across from the scattered ruins of the blue and ocher building, sprawled now in a chaos that matched the chaos outside the white encircling walls. He carried a rifle over his shoulder, twin to that still grasped by Crane. “I found it,” he called. “McArdle must have dropped it when you ran out of ammo, skipper. He was too confident, too cocky by miles.”

“Too confident for his own good,” said Polly, holding onto Crane’s arm. “He didn’t know what the Loti knew, even though he was such a clever technician — he wasn’t basically a scientist. He didn’t have the necessary education in the higher techniques—”

“Still and all,” said Crane, rubbing a hand across his newly-shaven jaw, “you have to feel sorry for the villain. After all he’d done, losing the maps and finding them, breaking in here using me as a front-runner to break up the opposition, bursting into where his own body was stored, lying down to change into it — and…”

“The Loti said the result would be nasty.”

“It brought everything down,” Gould said, indicating the ruins. “Luckily the spaceship remained upright; but it was touch and go.”

“And thank goodness you were shielded by the Warden,” said Polly, and she squeezed Crane’s arm. Gould looked away, looked across at Sharon, and Sharon walked to him and took his arm. This potential four-sided triangle, at least, wasn’t going to erupt in passion and envy, Crane knew with a profound sense of relief. He wanted Polly. He wanted her badly. And he thought she wanted him. But it was nice to know that there would be no ghost of Allan Gould to haunt their future happiness.

Varnat waved goodbye and his chair atop its shining bowl floated away up into the sun-drenched sky towards the open airlock of the ship.

“Farewell, people of this planet,” he said, “even if you are not of this dimension. Maybe we will meet again, one day — who knows?”

But Crane, for one, knew that to be polite fiction; the Loti were gone from earth forever. The airlock closed. A rumble, quickly cut off, shook the earth. Then, without fuss, quietly, the ship lifted, rose higher and faster, flickered — and vanished.

“They’re gone,” Polly whispered. “Across the empty spaces between the stars — going home.”

Around them now stretched the ruins of the city, girdled by the white guardian wall. Beyond that the land heaved and writhed, lost in a torment of primeval chaos. Each person picked up a suitcase or a package.

“You’ll have to watch out for Barney,” Crane told Colla. “He won’t know what to do with all those diamonds.”

“Sure and we’ll keep an eye out for him. Didn’t the Loti talk to him, now? Isn’t he as sane as you or I now?”

“Of course I am,” said Barney. “And the quicker we get back to our own Earth the better. I have plans.”

The world shimmered around them. A keening wind smote down for a moment so that their hair blew and their clothes ruffled and Polly clasped Crane harder. The land reared up. The sky fell, parted and drained away: