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Read Ebook: Savage Galahad by Walton Bryce Kiemle H W Henry William Illustrator
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SAVAGE GALAHAD
Tons of sinuous muscle, buried in fetid Venusian slime, he knew how to survive. Equipped with an ageless brain and lightning instincts, he also knew how to die!
He stirred slightly, the ponderously long, yet smoothly-flowing lines of his body, trembling vaguely with the undulating rhythm of the tall pale watergrass. Dim and monstrous shadows floated past, then suddenly spurted in frenzied speed to devour or be devoured. And the dark blue tint of the swamp water browned in wavering veins of blood.
An alien organism had come to his world. Its strange radiations pierced his brain in waves of bizarre beauty. Its uniqueness was disturbing the long sleep he was enjoying in the warm soft slime. A being from a far world, which he read symbolized in her confused mind as EARTH. And facing certain death, she was utterly disoriented with terror.
She reacted mentally to his world. The name she applied to it was Venus, Planet of the Morning and that was beauty of expression. She was beauty and so were her thoughts; her world must have been of that nature, too. His world had no beauty anywhere in it; beauty would be alien here, yet he was tired of ugliness.
His massive brain circuit contacted hers in its subtle supersonic way, knowing everything she had known or could know, thinking as she thought, reacting as she reacted far above him where she wandered alone along the vaporous fringe of his swamp. And he suddenly realized how alien she really was, for here on his world she was like a bubble floating beneath the surface of his lake, on the edge of countless dangers, confronted by a thousand deaths, but completely unaware of their nearness or exact nature. This was not her world. It would never be a world for her species. And abruptly he wanted to see her, touch her. Touch this beautiful bubble before it burst. For he had never known beauty before, and he was hungry for it.
One giant flipper moved softly, and the ponderously sleek form, long and pointed and glistening through the water, lanced upward, streaking the depths in a silent blurring arc.
He studied her with curious and new emotions through the thick, heavy-hanging mists, his long serpentine form curled out along the global swamp, undulating between the spongy swaying trunks of two bulbous trees, half-buried in the thick iridescent mud, and effectively hidden from her alien eyes by interlocking crinoids and gigantic towering ferns.
Monstrous insects droned broodingly through the sultry vapors and ventured to light on his gleaming hide. A quick twitch of long steely tendons blotted them out in lightning grips. But his thickly lidded eyes remained fixed on the girl who had come from Earth.
He was not disappointed in her beauty of form. It had a soft, rhythmic smoothly-flowing curvature. It seemed to him a perfect aesthetic creation of its kind. The contrast, too, impressed him--her frail, delicate form treading so fearfully among gigantic flora and fauna of endless varieties, each vying with the others in size and ferocity. Because of this contrast she seemed more beautiful here, perhaps, than she might on her own world. But she should not be here; she would find only death here. She did not understand this world, and she never would.
He felt the pangs of an emotion utterly strange to him. He plunged the supersonic fingers of his brain deeply into hers and found an expression there that would vaguely define that emotion. LOVE. It was an abstract symbol that on her own world meant the crystallization of celestial ideals.
The many other emotions that accompanied the symbol, LOVE, on her world--hate, jealousy, hope, ambition, despair, courage--these did not enter his massive neural circuits. She felt this great emotion for another being somewhat like her, very close by. This other being, he examined only briefly for he was ugly, a frantic figure pacing nervously in something they both knew as a SHIP that rested not far away in the swamp. She had wandered away from the SHIP and could not find her way back to it through the mists. And this other organism--MAN--was being driven into complete disintegration with anxiety and fear for her.
But he knew that the man would never find her. There was no jealousy or hate or envy as he curled through the swamp, watching her. That would spoil the beauty of this moment. She would be destroyed soon; other emotions must not distract from the few moments he had in which to absorb this aesthetic thrill of her movements.
His triple-lidded eyes could not see it, but that was not necessary; because of his supersonic brain, he was a ruler of this swamp world, and that was why he would survive the dull grey aeons that stretched ahead. So long as his supersonic brain guided his actions he would rule.
He tensed the full length of his mighty corded body, his twelve flippers digging into the glowing mud, his gigantic corded tail curled in feral silence around into a taut S that could spring outward in a blinding explosion of power.
And these beings had mechanical detectors based somewhat on his organic equipment. But they were utterly inadequate to meet the predatory ferocity of his world. Why had these irrational creatures ventured from their own comparatively safe world to this? If they actually intended to remain, their chances of survival depended on almost immediate adaptation. But that would be impossible, of course.
He waited, too, watching her. Somehow she seemed more a thing of beauty as she approached death. Death lent a sadness that added to her beauty a kind of poignancy. His eyes half-lidded dreamily as the full softness of the emotion flowed through him.
A strange world, that--a soft, slow-turning world of dream more than reality; of hope rather than realization; of delusion taking the place of struggle.
All of the girl's reactions went through his brain, and he was amazed by their pointless complexity. A thousand fragments jostled each other in her mind. Memories of the past, forgotten mistakes, hopes for the future with no regard for probability, visions of the lover who waited in the SHIP. All these and many more, equally irrelevant to this dire situation. She should be concentrating on one thing--escape. Yet she was not moving. She was in a kind of paralysis he could not understand.
He acted as lightning strikes, instinctively. Later he would know why. In his world thought had to follow action. His huge jaws closed on a number of the thick tentacles, severed them. They whipped free of the girl, jerking and contorting, slashing the murky vapor in aimless death patterns. The girl somehow had staggered out of reach of the remaining ones.
He dropped down again, out of sight, writhing away to bury himself again in mud and fog. He searched her mind. Had she seen him? She must have. Strange that he could find no reaction. There seemed to be a kind of shock. She had seen him. Then some mental defense mechanism had blinded her memory to him. Did she find him ugly? Why? Should not he be possessed of some kind of beauty, also? He had within him the capacity to appreciate beauty. At least she should be sympathetic and grateful and kind to him if she knew he was saving her from death, and pain. Yet--her mind would not accept him. She had seen him briefly, then forgotten.
Her terror and nervous disintegration was acute now. He could save her from physical dangers, but he could not protect this soft strange mind and nervous system from breaking apart and losing its balance of function.
Yet her beauty still remained, and that was his chief interest. The fluid motion, contour, symmetry and rhythm remained as before; was the justification for her continued existence in his eyes.
Her motions did not follow her mental direction at all now. She reached her hands out as though trying to part thick mist like a solid web. She groped about in small circles. Then she stopped, her eyes parted wide, and she screamed. Through the holocaust of sound--the cries, bellows, and screeches and hisses of the swamp--her scream was almost soundless. Yet its mental significance cut into his great brain like a wound.
The girl stood stiff with terror, mindless, muscles drawn tight, nerves twitching.
Why had she reacted so adversely to that brief sight of him? Why was he so uncertain about his course of action? If he had a form suitable for her eyes, if he could look forward to having her always to watch its perfect rhythm of movement; if he were only assured of her beauty going on forever, flowering for his pleasure in this world of teeming ugliness, if--
He coiled and uncoiled, unleashing the full force of his great power. His body twisted, jerked over and over in lightning-fast, explosive arcs. Simultaneously he rolled in the direction of his swamp lake, at the bottom which he had lived for all his lonely life.
In the tepid bubbling water their individual differences were largely canceled. Here they could battle to the ultimate decision.
This was his last battle. His instinct told him that. Somehow, though, his instinct had failed him this time. Taking the girl back to her SHIP had been an error of instinct. He would never know why he had done it, because he would not have time to study the psychology of it.
He felt the great holes being ripped in his belly where his flippers had been torn out. He felt his thick cold blood streaming out in rivers, thickening the swamp lake. He noted the darting lusting hunger of the intent school of killer snakes that were already swimming into the current of that blood, following up the direction of the final feeding.
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