The existence of this eBook edition of this pair of long ago (the nineteen fifties) science fiction adventures is owing to the yeoman work of Jean Marie Stine (of Renaissance E-Books) and the lamp she lifts into the shadowed corridors of science-fiction's adolescent past. For us doddering graybeards among the fiction-fantasy writers of the "golden days," dusting off these vintaged inspirations of our yester-years serves as a resurrection in itself. Whereas these star-blinded brainstorms of the past become new discoveries to modern fandom, to those of us who once "dreamed the impossible dreams" they deliver the balm of nostalgia. But there is more than that. A kind of life panorama is resurrected, in which much is remembered that was never told--about those works and the era in which they were born.

This novella, Metamorphs, once came close to being on the motion-picture screen. In my Hollywood days of following the yellow brick road of "Show Biz," I had scripted it under the spectacular title, Monster In My Blood. The former producer of This Island Earth bought it for $8,000. However, his principal finance for the film depended on Boris Karloff acting the part of the chief Metamorph. Regrettably, friend Karloff died in the middle of casting. I also speculated a script for another producer who wanted to do a horror-monster adventure pic, staged in the tropics of South America. This of course resurrected The Naked Goddess, script titled The Bridge of Time. But alas! He, too, failed to raise his capital.

But the memories engendered by these works embrace a far broader spectrum. The fact that both of these stories were cover-featured in Other Worlds magazine opens the true "other world" of the Roaring Fifties when science-fiction and fantasy reigned supreme. It also opens a special link to the editor of Other Worlds, Ray Palmer, who not only published many more of my stories but constituted a story in himself. There is also an untold link between The Naked Goddess and circumstances leading to my first meeting Ray in Chicago of 1947. The Naked Goddess has its background in South America, where I lived five years during World War II while working for Pan American-Grace Airlines (Panagra). But that background was originally used in the story, Prometheus II, which became my first cover story, then published in Amazing Stories, whose editor then was--you guessed it--Ray Palmer.

Ah but the untold stories are endless and there is more to tell that may ever be known, and yet the intrepid and insuppressible adventurers on the shoreless oceans of sci-fi memorabilia are as undying as the flame of discovery that glows ever beyond the horizon, and beyond--and beyond ... Meanwhile, here are long-lost harbors to explore...

Stuart J. Byrne

Dec., 2005

Beneath the shell of consciousness, dreams and memory combined in Shahn's struggling mind. After two hundred years, he was stirring out of suspended animation...

Nrlan!

Graveless is Nrlan, world of the dead great past. It drifts a nebulous cold cloud of death and ashes down the shoreless sea--emptiness where once were dreams and love and laughter--and dark despair.

Beloved mate, wearer of my own scar of san, Sralna, she of the summer moons, who died in terror. San Dialnis, Valley of the Jansi Light. We walked together there, Sralna and I--heedless of the Change...

Rospor, so tall and inhumanly thin, with his deep, dark eyes and glasslike nose--standing there weaponless yet menacing and demanding.

Sralna, with only her sleeping robe, awakened by the intrusion. He hated the uninhibited gaze of Rospor.

"The Khal has entrusted you with the complete details. You must comprehend them, as you are his chief disciple. I want the sarniall weapon!"

"The weapon belongs to Vrulnus, Khal of Nrlan. You know it is the only hope of our kind against the Metamorphs." He placed a protecting arm about Sralna, his mate in dialnis.

"Nothing can stand in my way, Shahn. You will draw me the plans of the sarniall or suffer the consequences."

"You idiot! Even if I should prepare them, do you think you could escape the power of the Khal, who alone stands against the Metamorphs? If they do not fear him, why do they send you to me, instead? Go ask mighty Vrulnus, himself!"

"I am not alone ... " The strange note in his voice chilled them with the shock of its implication.

"Do you mean--that you, a human--serve them?"

"Yes, you fools! The only logical answer is to cooperate with the enemy! The Metamorphs depend on us for their continued existence as a species, since they evolve from us yet cannot reproduce. Can't you realize that our own power of procreation is the currency for bartering? In exchange for collaboration they will give power undreamed of. That is why I am commandeering one of your star ships tonight and taking off with a load of Metamorph chrysalides--for the new world. They have assured me of the power to rule any planet, provided that I obtain the secret of the sarniall, and I intend to get it."

He leaped at Rospor and was met with a staggering blow. Before he could recover, Sralna screamed. The room began to darken. Or rather, a darkness was taking shape in it--a terrible kind of darkness that tried to recall a subliminal memory of deadly existence before the advent of humanity. Latent, prenatal stimulus-response patterns took over in the presence of that materializing evil, and one tended to shrivel up and curl away from it, seeking the darkness of the egg in preference to life fraught with this incomprehensible terror. It robbed the mind of reason and will before the steam-roller impact of wild, shrieking fear. At first an amorphous shadow, it quickly assumed the proportions of a jet-black, faceless man--a Metamorph!

Above Sralna's screams he could hear Rospor's laughter. "Hurry, Shahn, before it takes her life!"

The sheer madness of desperation threw him upon the shadowy thing, and his hands were numbed with cold when he tried to take hold of it and drag it from his mate. Color drained from her beautiful face along with the precious miracle force of life itself. And her hair! Visibly, it was turning ashen gray!

"Stop!" he cried out. "I'll do it! I'll give you the plans--anything!"

"No you won't!"

It was great Vrulnus, the Khal, himself, on the threshold--Vrulnus, leader of the race, the single human force in the universe to oppose the nemesis. Ah, precious man! Only one Khal such as he may be born in a thousand generations. He stood there, towering above Rospor, his gray eyes ablaze with anger, the twin scar symbol of the Khal gleaming on his broad brow, in his hands a glowing sarniall--the only completed one in existence. As he activated it, the room spun around--and around...

To obliterate them, Nrlan was destroyed. Vrulnus had offered his people this terrible solution or the unspeakable alternative.

Thus the star ships. Year after year the flat, circular ships leapt interstellar chasms broader than life...

Shahn opened his eyes and focused them at last upon reality. At first this reality consisted of a section of the ceiling, crisscrossed with conduits and airlines. Ingrained stimulus-response patterns struggled against conscious awareness. Mental defense mechanisms sought to reject the evidence of catastrophic events which lent truth to his tortured memories.

This could have been the ceiling of a subterranean apartment on Nrlan where they hibernated during perihelion near the solar reservoirs and the incubators while on the surface world the plants and trees folded in upon themselves and exuded a heat-resistant coating.

Soon the summer years would come, when they would emerge. He remembered the thousands of lakes and lagoons, the soaring mountains, the landlocked seas with their myriad islands--and the four moons which governed their life--the Moon of Jansi, under whose light only the generation of the procreators might walk--especially in that land set apart for lovers, San Dialnis...

"Sralna!" he cried, sitting up suddenly and looking about him in the crypt-like ship.

Instead of Sralna, he saw the long row of hiber-bunks upon which the passengers lay. Grinning skulls stared back. The others had not survived the suspended animation.

They were dead, long gone with the memory of tragic Nrlan--and Sralna.

Why had he alone survived? Was it that his people had seen in him their future Khal, in the event that Vrulnus should not come through? He had been laid here while yet unconscious. By whose careful hand had his body been prepared for the long, dark journey? Perhaps his beloved teacher, Vrulnus, himself. And now where was he?

Shock held him incapacitated for an unmeasured time while he sweated coldly, alone in the unknown abyss of Infinity. Where was he?--and to what avail? Could even the genius of the Khal, himself, have penetrated the vastness of lifeless worlds and pinpointed their objective accurately--and could his miraculous machine creations hold to such a tenuous orbit?

Yet the fact that he was conscious now gave proof that automatic relays were at work after all these years. Sensitive thermo-couples atop the low dome of the star ship had been activated by some nearing sun. Mere micro-amperes of current were creating magnetic fields in tiny solenoids which were tripping powered relays. The ship was awakening, too.

As the only surviving passenger, certain responsibilities now devolved upon him. He stirred himself at last, and entered the observation dome. Through the leaded, polarized visiports he saw again the ponderous star-walls of the universe, but without Sralna this mighty symbol of the Immortal Plane assailed him again with an overwhelming sense of loneliness. Why not go out the airlock and embrace oblivion?

Why not? Ah, there was the essence of the ageless dilemma!--finite self versus the instinct of ethnic survival. This ship belonged to his race. It represented a part of the Exodus, a unit among thousands, but a precious symbol of their heroic bid for life. It had to complete its mission. There was work to be done.

Moreover, the haunting premonition pursued him--that if Vrulnus had not come through, then he, as the great one's last living disciple, must become Khal. To him the survivors would look for guidance and salvation.

But no! Futile thought! Vrulnus was indestructible. He must have survived, and even now was taking charge of their new life in the promised land ahead. Shahn forced himself to hold to this and nothing more.

First of all, the tapes should be read. Probably for years now they had been recording occasional messages transmitted from the bases set up on the new world by the earlier arrivals from Nrlan. Owing to variations in velocity of the various ships over the long period of time required for the journey, it had been foreseen that some would arrive many years before the others. Since his own ship had been among the last to leave, he wondered how long the first to arrive had already been settled in the new world and what their transmitted reports would reveal.

But before he listened to the tapes he used the electronic telescope. The new world was the third planet of this chosen system. Even at this great distance he could make out its disc and detect the promising color of chlorophyll green and see the welcome white of suspended water vapor.

"Ship 763!" blared the speaker system, which was patched into the receiver circuit. "Nrlani Base N-I calling ship 763. If any survivors hear this, reply immediately!"

He looked dumbly at the speaker. From that distant world he was looking at, one of the voices of his own kind had reached out through the abyss of space and addressed him.

"Ship 763!" The message was repeated, while Shahn marveled at it. To hear someone else's voice, speaking to him in his native Nrlani tongue ... !

He flicked a transmitter switch and answered. "Ship 763 to Base N-I. This is Shahn of Vrulnus Base. What are your instructions?"

There was an answering silence which puzzled him at first until he remembered that radio waves were limited to the velocity of light. At his present distance from the new planet it would require some time for his message to be received and a reply returned. So he busied himself with the tapes to learn what message of hope had been received out of this brave Tomorrow which his people had wrested from the calloused hand of Fate.

Yet, even as he permitted his resilient spirit this slight unfolding of optimistic wings they were suddenly clipped short. He had not wished to spin the tapes all the way back, so he had listened in at random and heard--

"...It has not been fully determined whether or not Rospor succeeded in reaching Earth. If he did land here and establish his Metamorphs, there is as yet no indication of it inasmuch as the Metamorphs thus far encountered on this planet may have come into being as the result of varying other circumstances, such as a failure to commit suicide before metamorphosis owing either to cowardice, amnesia--or indeed that same degenerate lust for power which deviated Rospor from the course of human allegiance. Suffice it to say, our curse of old has been brought to this innocent world, and the responsibility develops wholly upon ourselves to-"

He shut it off abruptly and stared through a visiport at distant Earth. A slight film of perspiration was on his skin. Lumps of muscles along his jaw tightened, and his deep-set black eyes gleamed bitter hate under heavy brows.

"Metamorphs!" he exclaimed, his voice almost breaking under the stress of his emotions.

After all the dangers and the torment, after the sacrifices and the antiseptic obliteration of a planet greater than Earth, they had gotten through to contaminate this last horizon of hope! And Rospor! He should have killed him that last night on Nrlan. Curse him and all his kind on Earth!

He lunged at the port, his hands spreading across its cold smoothness as though he would cup the Earth in his palms like a wounded bird. "Thanks to Ao!" he cried. "I am still young, and Vrulnus was my teacher! I'll fight! I'll track them down! I'll build a sarniall!"

The thought of Ao gave him pause. Strange, after the death of his world and at the end of this terrible journey, he should still cling to the thought of Ao.

When Nrlan was destroyed what of its moons? What of great, dark Gral, and the eternal light of Ao?--that mystical entity which glowed always in the black disc of the farthest moon.

Legend had said many things of Ao. Vrulnus, the Khal, had intimated much more--that it was even the secret of the greatness that once was Nrlan's prior to time-misted cataclysms of the buried past.

The thought that even this eternal thing was gone into the gulf of Yesterday accentuated his sense of futility. He sweated and raged silently within, as he gazed ahead at the innocent world to which his kind had brought a plague worse than death.

"Ship 763!" blared the speaker. His message was being answered. "Base N-I to ship 763 and operator Shahn of Vrulnus Base--welcome to, Earth! Long has your arrival been awaited, Shahn.

"Stand by for course coordinates which will bring you to N-I. We have succeeded in keeping our presence a secret from the inhabitants, as originally planned, so entry into the atmosphere is required precisely over the base, itself..."

Shahn could not resist an emotional outburst. He flipped on the transmitter switch. "How do I know you're not a Metamorph?" he demanded.

Minutes later, the answer came back. "You don't. But that goes both ways, doesn't it? Our base task force will intercept to make sure you land where we want you..."

Shahn hurled one more burning question. "The Khal!" he called. "Did he come through?"

After what seemed to be too long a wait, the reply returned, cold and factual.

"Vrulnus, Khal of Nrlan is dead..."

Shahn stood looking at the inanimate speaker as though it were alive. At last he clenched his fists and shouted, "It's a lie!"

But he suddenly thought it wise to say no more. Vrulnus, greatest of Khals, was indestructible. Surely he was there, hiding out for reasons of his own. And Shahn would find him.

If not--and if Vrulnus were truly dead--then by all the old laws he was Khal. If this latter were true, then he was no longer subject to their instructions.

A Khal must initiate his own plans if he were to guide his people.