Warlock

much, for even we are somewhat ignorant of what transpired during the Blank, as you call it.”
        
        “Undoubtedly,” Richter said, “you know more than we. Your land still contains traces and even cities from that period of time.”
        
        “Sometimes,” Berlarak said, “artifacts only tend to confuse the archaeologist further.”
        
        He filled both of their glasses again, poured himself another draught of purple liquor as well, and settled into his tale.
        
        “More than eight hundred years ago,” the creature began, “mankind had traveled into space. He had reached out into a thousand star systems and had settled colonies upon four hundred worlds. He traveled faster than the speed of light itself, and made these journeys in little more than hours.”
        
        Commander Richter made a show of disbelief and looked at the Shaker to see if the old magician had been taken in by the tale or whether he realized the folly behind such claims. But the Shaker seemed perfectly willing to accept even the particulars of what Berlarak had told them. “Remember,” he told Richter, “that our only hope of victory in all of this is to keep an open mind. That little bit of the traditionalist in you-which I warned you about before-has finally come to the surface and is refusing to accept the wonders that, intellectually, you know must be true.”
        
        “I didn't ask for a personality probe,” Richter said, just a little peeved. He turned to Berlarak. “Go on, then. Tell us more.” Though he seemed to want to learn all the white-furred creature could tell them, he was still reluctant to concede that men could speed between the suns in so short a space of time.
        
        Berlarak's story was one of fantasies that had an underlying grit of truth which made itself heard and soon had both listeners convinced of what he told them, even if they often accepted his tales with a degree of doubt and reserve at first. He spoke of experiments to defy gravity that were coming to fruit just before the fall of civilization. He said that the surgery of the day had been able to replace a heart with a manufactured heart if the real one should give out, that plastic livers could replace flesh ones, that a leg which had been severed could be regenerated in a few weeks.
        
        Glasses were filled again.
        
        And were quickly drained.
        
        And Berlarak went on:
        
        The world before the Blank, from what Berlarak's people had re-discovered, was a place where nearly anything was possible. If parents did not wish to give birth to their children, surrogate wombs were available to handle the uncomfortable period of pregnancy. For those who appreciated the beauty of the many alien races mankind had encountered in the universe, and for those who were also somewhat giddy and sated with the pleasures of the planets, there were surgical and genetic engineering chambers where they could have their outward appearance altered to resemble some creature they had seen and admired-and where they could also have their germ plasm radiated and engineered so that their children would be human beings in mind only. Berlarak's people theorized that they were the descendants of one of these cults of race-changers. Their parents had survived the collapse of society and had produced offspring which had survived in the shattered city.
        
        “But with all these miracles within their fingertips,” the Shaker said, “why couldn't they have prevented the destruction of their world? What was it that happened- that not even these gods and goddesses could manipulate to their pleasure and well-being?” He was not being skeptical of what old Berlarak had told them. He believed all of that implicitly now. His tone, instead, was one of anguish at the thought of what mankind had come to after such heights of glory.
        
        According to Berlarak, war had erupted between man and an alien race known as Scopta'-mima on a world that humans called Cramer's Camp and which the Scopta'-mima called something else again, something unpronounceable. It raged from one of the four hundred settled planets to another, until it reached Earth herself. The Scopta'-mimas fought with energy weapons that mankind could not even vaguely understand, and in the end the aliens had applied some fantastic lever to the crust of the earth, causing it to shift, to leap