Jandar of Callisto

1. THE LOST CITY OF MANOR

That the most far-reaching and momentous historical events often spring from minute and seemingly inconsequential accidents is a fact which I can attest from my own experience.

For the past four months now―insofar as I have been able to measure the passage of time―I have dwelt on an alien world, surrounded by a thousand foes, struggling and battling my way through innumerable perils to win a place beside the most beautiful woman in two worlds.

And all of these adventures, these wonders and terrors, sprang from a single cause, and that cause was a crumb of dirt half the size of my thumbnail.

As I sit, painfully and slowly setting down these words with a quill pen and homemade ink on a sheet of rough parchment, I cannot help but wonder at the obscure vanity which prompts me to record the tale of my incredible adventures―a tale which began in a lost city deep in the impenetrable jungles of southeast Asia and which ventures from there across the incredible distance of three hundred and ninety million miles of infinite space to the surface of a weird and alien planet. A tale, furthermore, which I deem it most unlikely any other human eye will ever read.

Yet I write on, driven by some inexplicable urge to set down an account of the marvels and mysteries which I alone of all men ever born on earth have experienced. And when at last this narrative is completed, I will set it within the Gate in the hopes that, being composed entirely of organic matter, paper and ink as well, it may somehow be transported across the immeasurable gulf of interplanetary space to the distant world of my birth, to which I shall never return.

In the night sky, at certain seasons when the Inner Moons are on the other side of our primary and the starry skies are clear, I can (I fancy) see the earth. A remote and insignificant spark of blue fire it seems from this distance; a tiny point of light lost amid the blackness of the infinite void. Can it truly be that I was born and lived my first twenty-four years on that blue spark―or was that life but a dream, and have I spent all of my days upon this weird world of Thanator? It is a question for the philosophers to settle, and I am but a simple warrior.

Yet I can well remember my father. He was a tall man, stern-faced and powerfully built, with scowling brows and thick black locks. His name was Matthew Dark; a Scotsman from Aberdeenshire, an engineer by profession, and a wanderer by inclination, he tramped the world to its far corners searching for the joy of life, its richness, its color, which always eluded him and always seemed to beckon from over the next horizon.

From him I seem to have inherited my inches, for like him I am something over six feet; from him, as well, must come my strength, for among men I am reckoned a strong man of great endurance and stamina. But it was from my mother came the gift of my yellow hair and blue eyes, which have none of the dour, darkling Scot in them. She was a Danish girl from a town whose name I cannot pronounce and she died when I was a small child. All that I can remember of her is a soft warm voice, a sweet smiling face bending over me, the touch of a gentle hand. And I seem to see laughing blue eyes, as calm and deep and sparkling as the lakes of her homeland, and the gleam of pale gold hair woven in thick braids―alas, it is only a shard of memory, a brief glimpse into a past which I can never recapture, never completely recall.

The color of my hair and my eyes, these were the only gifts she ever gave me, besides my life itself. But in an odd way I owe her a double debt: for it was for reason of my yellow hair and blue eyes that my life was spared when I fell into the cruel hands of the savage and inhuman warriors of the Yathoon―but I am getting ahead of my own story.

If I owe my mother the double debt of life given and life saved, I at least owe my father for my name, Jonathan Andrew Dark. He was building a great hydroelectric project in Denmark when he met and loved and wed my laughing, blue-eyed mother. She went with him to South America for his next job, for an engineer must go where his work leads him, and wanderers have no home. And thus it chanced that while my mother was a Dane and my father a Scot, and I am now a naturalized American, I was born in Rio.

Of my early life there is little enough to tell. Or, rather, I run the risk of telling too much―for it has little bearing on the saga of my adventures on the fantastic world that has now become my home. A tropical fever carried off my lovely mother when I was only three; my father I seldom saw, for he was off building a highway in Peru, a dam in Bolivia, a bridge in Yucatan. But when death took her from us I became his constant companion. Prim and proper folk might be scandalized to think of a tender child amid the savage surroundings of a jungle camp, but I thrived on the rough, exciting life, and to this I am sure I owe my love of peril and adventure. For I saw the green, stinking interior of the Matto Grosso before I ever saw the interior of a schoolroom, and was familiar with the dangerous rope bridges that span the airy heights of the high Andes before I ever saw a paved city street.

I became a sort of pet or protege to the engineers of my father's camp. It was that laughing bandit Pedro who taught me to throw a knife before I ever learned my letters, and the big Swede, Swenson, who taught me every trick of rough-and-tumble fighting his brawny, battered body had ever learned. I could bring down a hunting jaguar with one cool steady shot straight between its burning eyes even as it sprang for my throat―long before I had mastered the occult mysteries of long division.

Yes, long division―for my formal schooling had been somewhat neglected while I had learned to brew coffee with water taken from a snake-infested jungle stream and heated over kerosene flames in a battered tin pot, to hunt and fight like a man, to climb like a monkey, and to survive where a city-bred boy would have succumbed to fever ticks, snakebite, or cholera. It happened when I was about thirteen. My father had had enough of the banana republics by now; he yearned for the dry, parched air and gorgeous nights of the desert after years spent in the sweltering sinkhole of marshy jungles; he was thinking of an oil-drilling project in Iraq.

But in the back alleys of a vile little jungle town named Puerto Maldonado he ran into an American geologist named Farley, an old friend of many years standing. Puerto Maldonado is in the back country of Peru, on the shores of a river called Madre de Dios, "Mother of God." God, however, had nothing to do with Farley being in Puerto Maldonado: he was hunting for the place where the Incas had gotten their gold.

He had found nothing but ticks, mosquitoes, and a particularly nasty breed of snake the natives called jararaca. It was a nip in the ankle from the venomous fangs of this particular denizen of the jungles that had laid up Farley in the backroom of the only gin mill in Puerto Maldonado for three weeks. My father and his friend celebrated their chance meeting with copious toasts of bad gin in fly-specked glasses, and somewhere between the second and the third bottle my father conceived the notion that I required schooling. Here was Farley, a distinguished geologist with a string of college degrees after his name, like paper tags in the tail of a kite. And here was I, a tall, rawboned, broad-shouldered and sunburnt boy, able enough to hack through the tangled and snake-infested swamps of the Matto Grosso like a veteran, but a green-eared novice when it came to the mystic doctrines of long division.

In less time than it takes me to describe the event, a decision had been reached. Farley was on his way to the coast when the next mail packet came chugging down the coiling silver length of the Madre de Dios; thence overland to the burgeoning young city of Santo Domingo and a bush pilot named O'Mara who would fly him to civilization. He was on his way back to what he described as "God's Country," but what the geography books call the United States of America, and with all possible haste, for there was a professorship open at Harvard for a seasoned field geologist, and he was hungry for the world of cinema, cocktail lounge, and campus. And, besides, he had been lucky this time to have spent only three weeks sweating jararaca venom out of his guts. He preferred not to give the wriggling little monsters the chance for a second bite.

So I was off to America with the would-be Herr Professor, and, to tell the truth, I didn't at all mind the idea. I had become aware in recent months that we men shared the world with a delectable species called girls, and I would find few specimens here in the muddy jungles of Peru, while I was given to understand they were as common in America as was carrapato do chao, the humble ground tick, in this part of the world.

I never saw my father again. An exploding oil pocket in the uplands of Iraq nine months after this sent him to that El Dorado or Valhalla where all old adventurers spend their eternities. God bless him, for the world's a poorer place without him in it.

Not to occupy these pages with an account of the wonders of small-town America, which must be already familiar to my reader―if ever this most unusual journal is fortunate enough to find its way across three hundred and ninety million miles of space to the nearest reader capable of understanding English―I shall pass over the next several years without much more than a summary.

My lack of anything in the way of schooling proved a bit of an impediment. But Mr. Farley―now Assistant Professor Farley―serving in loco parentis, lined up enough tutors for a rash program. I proved, rather surprisingly to all, and especially to myself, an alert, bright student, and before long I was almost up to my age group. I had seen the interior of a schoolroom at last, and found it no less of a jungle in its way than the Matto Grosso had been. And the abstruse mysteries of long division were at last conquered.

Farley was teaching at Harvard, but somehow or other I ended up at Yale. I shall pass over these years briefly: they were happy years. I broke no fewer bones on the football field than do most undergraduates, and no fewer hearts in Lover's Lane, under the stimulus of a ripely golden Connecticut moon. Nor did my own heart escape without a fracture or two; but it's all part of the mystery of what philosophers call "growing up"―as if there was any other direction in which to growl

Oddly enough―for all the heady pleasures of the football field―I found more intoxication in the feel of a rapier in my hands. Quite by chance I discovered a natural affinity for the sword, and for two years running I was captain of Yale's famed fencing team. This, too, like the color of my hair and eyes, was to prove an unexpected blessing when I came to wandering and warring through the black and crimson jungles of barbaric Thanator―but again I am ahead of my story.

Although I was an American citizen by now, the wanderlust had bitten too deep, had struck me too young, for the quiet academic life to hold many attractions for me. I yearned, always, to see what lay beyond the dim horizon . . . over the next range of hills . . . beyond the bright waters of the shining sea.

Before the ink was dry on my sheepskin, I was off. A hasty farewell to the Professor, and I began to wander. The next couple of years took me far and wide. The restlessness, the wanderlust I had inherited from my father took me about the globe. A brief stint of journalism in New York, then I shipped as an ordinary seaman on a merchant tub to Stockholm. I learned to fly in India, of all places, and this led to a bit of refugee-running out of Cuba, arms smuggling in the Near East, and a few flights of medicine and food supplies into blockaded Biafra.

I ended up in Vietnam, and when some technicality over my naturalization papers looked to keep me out of the fight, I joined the Red Cross as a pilot, running supplies and medics into the trouble spots. My thirst for adventure had frequently carried me into trouble from which my fighting instincts had, till now, rescued me without permanent damage. But in Vietnam, something happened .. . .

The Viet Cong terrorists had made a strike at a small village and medical help was needed urgently. So urgently that they hauled me out of my billet on thirty minutes notice. I was to ride herd on a squad of choppers flying in medics and food and flying out the seriously injured.

I had just spent a couple of weeks in Saigon on leave so I was fresh and rested, so to speak. My group was stationed at a temporary field hacked out of the brush on the outskirts of Hon Quan, which is about sixty-five miles north of Saigon and only some ten miles or so from the borders of Cambodia.

We were a half hour out of Hon Quan when my chopper began to develop a bad case of the chokes. Something was wrong with one of the fuel lines, probably a morsel of dirt that had clogged the line. The sort of thing a full mechanic's checkout would have spotted and corrected, but we had been scrambled on notice too short for a full-scale check.

And that meant I was in trouble. We didn't have the big two- and three-man combat choppers the American army used; on rescue missions like these all I had was a little one-man copter. The cargo craft were up ahead, needed to fly out the injured. So I was all by myself.

I radioed the rest of the squadron and told them my second-in-command would take over as I was having engine trouble and would probably fall behind. They went on ahead while I dropped back, trying to figure out what to do. We were flying over some of the densest jungles on earth and there was nowhere to sit her down safely. If I could find a flat space to sit her down I could probably fix the trouble in no time, even if I had to unscrew one of the lines and blow the obstruction out.

I circled for a while, hunting. There was a chance, a slim one, that the line would clear itself, but I couldn't count on it. If the motor conked out I would crash in the treetops. A chopper comes down slowly, even without power, because the air catches and turns the blades, braking the rate of fall. That's the nice thing about these flying eggbeaters.

The bad thing is you are flying too low to bail out with a parachute.

I began to sweat.

For a half-hour I played with that chopper like a virtuoso with a Bach concerto, getting every ounce of go-power I could squeeze from my laboring engine. I couldn't return to base because I knew there was no landing area between there and here, having just flown over the same piece of countryside. But―who could say? Off to the west a bit there might be a clearing. I nursed her carefully in that direction.

A while later I spotted a flash of light, the yellow-brown glisten of a jungle river. My chopper was fitted out with pontoon gear, of course. Half the land in this desolate corner of the globe is swamp and marsh. If I could make it to that river I could at least make a landing.

I began wondering just where I was. No river of that size should be in my neighborhood. I must have flown farther afield in my search for landing space than I had suspected.

Could it be the Mekong? If so, I was in trouble. The Mekong isn't in Vietnam at all, but over the border in Cambodia. It traverses eastern Cambodia from north to south and empties into the South China Sea. And Cambodia is a place we were not supposed to be. A so-called "neutral" country, its ruler, Prince Sihanouk, might be a jolly host to visiting American VIP's like Jackie Kennedy, but he was mighty inhospitable when it came to lost or strayed or crashed American pilots who violated what he laughingly called the neutrality of his borders―which the Cong are suspected to cross regularly.

But beggars cannot be choosers. Just as my chopper came over the broad, gliding floods of the jungle river, my exhausted engine gave one last strangled croak and died. The chopper fell like a stone. Then the uprush of air caught the dead blades. They creaked and began to turn. The rate of descent lessened―not much, but just enough.

The muddy yellow river swung up to smash me like a flyswatter in the hand of a giant. Just before I hit I caught one fleeting glimpse of thick green jungle lining either bank like a solid wall. Then I smacked the water and everything went black.

Well, as Carmody, the guy who taught me how to fly in India, used to say, any landing you can walk away from is a good one. I have a hunch even Carmody would not have thought much of the way I hit that river. Yellow-brown water smashed over the bubble canopy as we hit the surface with a jolt that knocked me against the panel. When I came to I had a cut on my brow streaming blood. I ached all over like one big bruise. But I was alive, at least.

But that belly flop had sprung leaks in both pontoons and they were filling up fast. I tore off my safety harness and inflated a rubber raft. Then I grabbed the emergency gear, prepacked in a knapsack for just such a spot, and got out.

The knapsack was packed with everything from snakebite serum to signal flares, and it made a bulky package. I wrestled it into the bobbing raft and climbed out dizzily. One pontoon was underwater already and the chopper was riding at a forty-degree angle, just about to slide under. I pushed away from the pontoon with one paddle, backed water a bit, and sat glumly, watching my one link with civilization go under. Then I roused myself and took along sour look around at the depressing scenery. The jungle was packed, green and thick, on either side of the river. It looked unpleasant. But with the raft I could get downriver and maybe be lucky enough to find a settlement of some kind. I began to paddle a bit, but the river whipped right along and I didn't need to work very hard to keep moving.

Pretty soon I was soaked with sweat and busy keeping off the bugs. The air was thick and soupy and hot. It stank of stagnant water and rotting vegetation and slimy mud, but I wouldn't have traded that river for the jungle. I could stand flies and stink and sweat, but the jungles hereabouts are somewhat less wholesome. They are crawling with unfriendly creatures, of which cobras are only one variety. Not to mention tigers and wild boar and elephants. I would take my chances with the river.

After a while, I sat and rested aching arms and sourly watched endless jungle whip by on either side of me. The Cambodian jungles are among the world's least hospitable places, thick with teak and dense bamboo and rubbery rhododendron bushes, the ground a sloppy quagmire of knee-deep leaf mold and greasy mud. I had carried off a machete from the helicopter, but I had no desire to have to use it. Let the river current do the work, was my motto. If worst came to worst, I was perfectly willing to simply glide downstream all the way to the sea.

I began to do some serious thinking about where I was. Our base at Hon Quan was some ten miles or so on the other side of the Cambodian border, but the Mekong itself lay farther away. I cudgeled my memory, trying to picture the maps I had seen. There was a map case in the bubble canopy, and a compass as well, but I had gotten out of the chopper so fast they had been left behind.

Could this be the Mekong? As far ac I could remember, the Mekong at its closest point to the border lay some fifty miles northwest of Hon Quan. Was it possible I had flown that far afield while searching for a spot to bring her down safely? Well . . . it was possible, but just barely. A chopper eats up the miles unobtrusively. I could have come that far, but I wondered: could this be another river? I recalled to mind the maps of Cambodia that I had studied. In the center lay something called the Tonle Sap, the Great Lake. This, I vaguely remembered, was supposed to have been the last shrinking remnant of a mighty prehistoric sea. Lots of rivers fed into it: I might have crashlanded on one of these tributaries and not on the Mekong. In which case, God alone knew where I was being carried by the swift gliding current of the muddy waters.

It was late afternoon by now and getting dark. The startlingly sudden night of the jungle was coming down across the sky. And here was another problem. Up to now I had been kept busy not so much by paddling, for the current was very swift, but by the necessity of shoving my rubber raft clear of half-sunken teak-wood logs and other river debris. All I needed was to brush up against one of those half-submerged snags. My raft would tear and sink in seconds. Then I would really have problems!

But how could I continue keeping the raft clear of snags when the impenetrable darkness of the jungle night closed down over the river? As it would be doing before very much longer ....

I decided on the only course that seemed advisable, and began to put in towards the nearer shore. I would just have to take my chances on spending the night in the jungle, and push on down river with dawn.

It was tough work breaking free of the rushing current, and it was pitch dark by the time I came to shore. I got out, my boots sinking to the knee in the foulsmelling mud, and dragged the lightweight raft up out of the water. It was marshy and soft on this part of the bank, and I fought my way through tall stiff grasses up to solid land, tying the raft securely to the limb of a fallen tree.

Then I sat down on the log and made a meal of sorts out of the emergency rations, washing it down with a swig of fresh water from one of the canteens. I was thirsty enough from the sweltering heat of my river journey to drink the whole canteen, but I knew that would be most unwise. It might be days before I came to a riverfront town or settlement, and I would need every drop of my water supplies. I had half a pack of cigarettes, so I rationed them as well. I sat and smoked and batted flies and watched the stars come out by the score. They burned bright and fierce against the night, like fistfuls of blue-white diamonds strewn across black velvet.

It was a beautiful sight, but I was in no mood to appreciate beauty just then. I began to wonder how I was supposed to sleep. I could lie down on the ground and take my chances with the cobras, or I could curl up in the rubber raft. But the raft would hardly be a barrier to any really determined cobra, and anyway there were other creatures infesting these jungles who might be inclined to come down to the barks of the river for a little drink.

The only alternative was to climb a tree and find a comfortable crotch. Then all I would have to worry about was falling asleep―and falling out. But it was too dark to see clearly and most of the trees nearby were unclimbable.

And then I saw the light.

It shone in the heavens above like a pale beacon. I froze, snuffing out my cigarette in the leaf mold, wondering about Viet Cong. Who else would have a searchlight operating in these jungles? If this was Cambodia, there certainly could be no friendly American camp nearby.

And I began to sweat again.

I was in enough trouble already without falling into enemy hands. I had seen some examples of what happened to Americans during "interrogation" at the hands of the Viet Cong. I began to wish I had kept going on the river awhile longer.

The light shone on. It was pallid and ghostly, a stationary pillar of faint light standing up against the stars. It seemed to waver rhythmically. It throbbed. It pulsed like a beating heart. My curiosity became overwhelming. And I knew that I could never dare sleep this close to whatever was making that jungle beacon without satisfying my curiosity. I had to discover the cause of this mystery.

Whatever was causing the light was not very far inland from the river. A few hundred yards at most.

Surely, if I watched my step, I could make my way close enough to the source of the weird pulsing column of light. I resolved to try, anyway.

Taking up my machete and slinging the pack across my shoulder, I started straight for it. I went slowly and tried to be as careful as possible, to avoid making any more noise than was necessary. But I really didn't have to worry about the noise my passage made as I squeezed through the thick underbrush. For the whole jungle had come alive around me with the onset of darkness. For night is the jungle's day. The big predators are aprowl, and the little scuttling things scurry through the brush seeking food and water. Only the monkeys sleep in the trees above, huddled together along the branches.

With every step my boots sank to the ankle and sometimes halfway to the knee in the slimy mulch of decaying leaves and reeking mud. I wormed through thick groves of bamboo and crept through gigantic rhododendron bushes. Their rubbery leaves swished against my face and slapped my shoulders. I hoped I would not disturb a sleeping boar. Or, for that matter, one of the slithering reptiles that infested this rotting hellhole.

Soon the light became dimly visible through the densely packed trees. It waxed and waned like a living thing of light. I paused from time to time to listen. No sound of diesel engines, no guttural Viet Cong voices, no chatter of radio static. Just the slap and wash of the river against the reedy shore, the rustle of small things sliding through the leaves, the thousand little ordinary sounds of the jungle.

I pushed forward, and came to the edge of a clearing. And stopped dead in my tracks, staring.

Before me, rising tier on tier out of the swampy bush, were the crumbling ramparts of an old stone city. Conical towers, covered with carved faces and wreathed with jungle vines, loomed up into the darkness.

I had stumbled upon a lost city, buried for ages in the jungles of Cambodia.