Almuric, Robert E. Howard [love books to read .txt] 📗
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Almuric
by Robert E. Howard
First published in 1939, copyright unrenewed.
Foreword
It was not my original intention ever to divulge the whereabouts of
Esau Cairn, or the mystery surrounding him. My change of mind was
brought about by Cairn himself, who retained a perhaps natural and
human desire to give his strange story to the world which had disowned
him and whose members can now never reach him. What he wishes to tell
is his affair. One phase of my part of the transaction I refuse to
divulge; I will not make public the means by which I transported Esau
Cairn from his native Earth to a planet in a solar system undreamed of
by even the wildest astronomical theorists. Nor will I divulge by what
means I later achieved communication with him, and heard his story
from his own lips, whispering ghostily across the cosmos.
Let me say that it was not premeditated. I stumbled upon the Great
Secret quite by accident in the midst of a scientific experiment, and
never thought of putting it to any practical use, until that night
when Esau Cairn groped his way into my darkened observatory, a hunted
man, with the blood of a human being on his hands. It was chance led
him there, the blind instinct of the hunted thing to find a den
wherein to turn at bay.
Let me state definitely and flatly, that, whatever the appearances
against him, Esau Cairn is not, and was never, a criminal. In that
specific case he was merely the pawn of a corrupt political machine
which turned on him when he realized his position and refused to
comply further with its demands. In general, the acts of his life
which might suggest a violent and unruly nature simply sprang from his
peculiar mental make-up.
Science is at last beginning to perceive that there is sound truth
in the popular phrase, “born out of his time.” Certain natures are
attuned to certain phases or epochs of history, and these natures,
when cast by chance into an age alien to their reactions and emotions,
find difficulty in adapting themselves to their surroundings. It is
but another example of nature’s inscrutable laws, which sometimes are
thrown out of stride by some cosmic friction or rift, and result in
havoc to the individual and the mass.
Many men are born outside their century; Esau Cairn was born outside
his epoch. Neither a moron nor a low-class primitive, possessing a
mind well above the average, he was, nevertheless, distinctly out of
place in the modern age. I never knew a man of intelligence so little
fitted for adjustment in a machine-made civilization. (Let it be noted
that I speak of him in the past tense; Esau Cairn lives, as far as the
cosmos is concerned; as far as the Earth is concerned, he is dead, for
he will never again set foot upon it.)
He was of a restless mold, impatient of restraint and resentful of
authority. Not by any means a bully, he at the same time refused to
countenance what he considered to be the slightest infringement on his
rights. He was primitive in his passions, with a gusty temper and a
courage inferior to none on this planet. His life was a series of
repressions. Even in athletic contests he was forced to hold himself
in, lest he injure his opponents. Esau Cairn was, in short, a freak—a
man whose physical body and mental bent leaned back to the primordial.
Born in the Southwest, of old frontier stock, he came of a race
whose characteristics were inclined toward violence, and whose
traditions were of war and feud and battle against man and nature. The
mountain country in which he spent his boyhood carried out the
tradition. Contest—physical contest—was the breath of life to him.
Without it he was unstable and uncertain. Because of his peculiar
physical make-up, full enjoyment in a legitimate way, in the ring or
on the football field was denied him. His career as a football player
was marked by crippling injuries received by men playing against him,
and he was branded as an unnecessarily brutal man, who fought to maim
his opponents rather than win games. This was unfair. The injuries
were simply resultant from the use of his great strength, always so
far superior to that of the men opposed to him. Cairn was not a great
sluggish lethargic giant as so many powerful men are; he was vibrant
with fierce life, ablaze with dynamic energy. Carried away by the lust
of combat, he forgot to control his powers, and the result was broken
limbs or fractured skulls for his opponents.
It was for this reason that he withdrew from college life,
unsatisfied and embittered, and entered the professional ring. Again
his fate dogged him. In his training-quarters, before he had had a
single match, he almost fatally injured a sparring partner. Instantly
the papers pounced upon the incident, and played it up beyond its
natural proportions. As a result Cairn’s license was revoked.
Bewildered, unsatisfied, he wandered over the world, a restless
Hercules, seeking outlet for the immense vitality that surged
tumultuously within him, searching vainly for some form of life wild
and strenuous enough to satisfy his cravings, born in the dim red days
of the world’s youth.
Of the final burst of blind passion that banished him for ever from
the life wherein he roamed, a stranger, I need say little. It was a
nine-days’ wonder, and the papers exploited it with screaming
headlines. It was an old story—a rotten city government, a crooked
political boss, a man chosen, unwittingly on his part, to be used as a
tool and serve as a puppet.
Cairn, restless, weary of the monotony of a life for which he was
unsuited, was an ideal tool—for a while. But Cairn was neither a
criminal nor a fool. He understood their game quicker than they
expected, and took a stand surprisingly firm to them, who did not know
the real man.
Yet, even so, the result would not have been so violent if the man
who had used and ruined Cairn had any real intelligence. Used to
grinding men under his feet and seeing them cringe and beg for mercy,
Boss Blaine could not understand that he was dealing with a man to
whom his power and wealth meant nothing. Yet so schooled was Cairn to
iron self-control that it required first a gross insult, then an actual
blow on the part of Blaine, to rouse him. Then for the first time in
his life, his wild nature blazed into full being. All his thwarted and
repressed life surged up behind the clenched fist that broke Blaine’s
skull like an eggshell and stretched him lifeless on the floor, behind
the desk from which he had for years ruled a whole district.
Cairn was no fool. With the red haze of fury fading from his glare,
he realized that he could not hope to escape the vengeance of the
machine that controlled the city. It was not because of fear that he
fled Blaine’s house. It was simply because of his primitive instinct
to find a more convenient place to turn at bay and fight out his death
fight.
So it was that chance led him to my observatory.
He would have left, instantly, not wishing to embroil me in his
trouble, but I persuaded him to remain and tell me his story. I had
long expected some catastrophe of the sort. That he had repressed
himself as long as he did, shows something of his iron character. His
nature was as wild and untamed as that of a maned lion.
He had no plan—he simply intended to fortify himself somewhere and
fight it out with the police until he was riddled with lead.
I at first agreed with him, seeing no better alternative. I was not
so naive as to believe he had any chance in the courts with the
evidence that would be presented against him. Then a sudden thought
occurred to me, so fantastic and alien, and yet so logical, that I
instantly propounded it to my companion. I told him of the Great
Secret, and gave him proof of its possibilities.
In short, I urged him to take the chance of a flight through space,
rather than meet the certain death that awaited him.
And he agreed. There was no place in the universe which would
support human life. But I had looked beyond the knowledge of men, in
universes beyond universes. And I chose the only planet I knew on
which a human being could exist—the wild, primitive, and strange
planet I named Almuric.
Cairn understood the risks and uncertainties as well as I. But he
was utterly fearless—and the thing was done. Esau Cairn left the
planet of his birth, for a world swimming afar in space, alien, aloof,
strange.
Esau Cairn’s Narrative
The Transition was so swift and brief, that it seemed less than a
tick of time lay between the moment I placed myself in Professor
Hildebrand’s strange machine, and the instant when I found myself
standing upright in the clear sunlight that flooded a broad plain. I
could not doubt that I had indeed been transported to another world.
The landscape was not so grotesque and fantastic as I might have
supposed, but it was indisputably alien to anything existing on the
Earth.
But before I gave much heed to my surroundings, I examined my own
person to learn if I had survived that awful flight without injury.
Apparently I had. My various parts functioned with their accustomed
vigor. But I was naked. Hildebrand had told me that inorganic
substance could not survive the transmutation. Only vibrant, living
matter could pass unchanged through the unthinkable gulfs which lie
between the planets. I was grateful that I had not fallen into a land
of ice and snow. The plain seemed filled with a lazy summerlike heat.
The warmth of the sun was pleasant on my bare limbs.
On every side stretched away a vast level plain, thickly grown with
short green grass. In the distance this grass attained a greater
height, and through it I caught the glint of water. Here and there
throughout the plain this phenomenon was repeated, and I traced the
meandering course of several rivers, apparently of no great width.
Black dots moved through the grass near the rivers, but their nature I
could not determine. However, it was quite evident that my lot had not
been cast on an uninhabited planet, though I could not guess the
nature of the inhabitants. My imagination peopled the distances with
nightmare shapes.
It is an awesome sensation to be suddenly hurled from one’s native
world into a new strange alien sphere. To say that I was not appalled
at the prospect, that I did not shrink and shudder in spite of the
peaceful quiet of my environs, would be hypocrisy. I, who had never
known fear, was transformed into a mass of quivering, cowering nerves,
starting at my own shadow. It was that man’s utter helplessness was
borne in upon me, and my mighty frame and massive thews seemed frail
and brittle as the body of a child. How could I pit them against an
unknown
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