The Fury Out of Time (25 page)

They left until last the delicate task of escorting the women to the landing dome. Most of them went passively, but a few became hysterical and had to be restrained. Wilurzil did not balk until her turn came to board the cargo carrier.

“You brought all these men here,” she said accusingly, pointing at the Galds. “You came to capture the Overseer.”

Karvel made no reply.

“You would have captured him. There was no need to kill him. You did not want him dead.”

Again Karvel had no answer.

“But
I
wanted him dead!” she said defiantly.

Then she broke down completely.

At Lewir, Karvel turned the women over to the doctors. He could only hope that their skill in psychiatry equaled their surgical achievements.

He was immediately caught up in a frenzy of activity, and he had no time for vain regrets, for soul-searching—even for mountain climbing. So exhausted was he that for one night he actually slept soundly.

A leader had to be appointed to fill the Overseer’s role in arbitrating disputes and managing supplies. The communications apparatus on the moon had to be repaired and manned, careful plans made to deal with the trading organization if it proved truculent, a mission appointed to return on the next spaceship to establish a direct link with the government of worlds. Karvel anticipated that the trading organization would not surrender without a fight, and he felt certain that it would have potent political influence. He did not find it easy to explain this to men who had no concept of politics, but he did his best.

And it was not his problem. As much as he would have liked to help, to learn more about man’s far-flung civilization, it was not his problem. He repeated that until he had halfway convinced himself.

He collected an advisory board of engineers and technicians and went to work on the U.O.

He faced three inexorable terrors: pressure, time, and space.

If temporal pressure continued to increase as long as the U.O. was in continuous operation, it would kill him. It had come within a straw’s weight of killing him on the journey to the future; the journey to the past would be twice as long.

If somehow he found a way to survive the pressure, time and space would kill him with disappointment and frustration—or old age.

He had no notion of the actual distance he would be traveling, but he knew that the most trivial of errors—say a mistake of a mere hundredth of a per cent—could be magnified to a staggering one hundred years on a journey that spanned a million. As far as he could tell, the U.O.’s instruments were not even designed to achieve that accuracy. If he made his instrument settings with an admittedly impossible precision, he could still miss his destination by a long lifetime!

He would take an extra supply of fuel and be prepared to make additional time jumps from his first stopping point, but in what direction, and how far?

If through some outlandish contortion of coincidence he did arrive at the correct point in time, he would probably never know it. The U.O.’s three landing places in the twentieth century had been a continent or a hemisphere apart. If Karvel opened the U.O.’s hatch and found himself alone on a lifeless Earth, should he assume that his error was one of time or space?

The empty fuel tank of the U.O.-2 and his uncertainty regarding the original instrument settings mocked all of his calculations. He must arrive at a precise time
and
a precise place—and the task seemed hopeless.

His advisory board had no suggestions. So remote to their experience were such problems that they did not seem to understand what he was talking about. He sent them home and called in a crew of Bribun’s mechanics.

He had long meditated the fact that the pressure that almost killed him had not damaged the most delicate items of his equipment. The equipment had been packed tightly into small cylinders; the passenger cylinder had been designed for comfort, with ample room for movement and with wasteful inches of foam padding. Could the pressure Within the cylinder be somehow related to its volume of empty space? He reasoned that it could.

The padding was ripped out and replaced with form-fitting armor built for him by the Bribs. Karvel would lie in Spartan discomfort in the tight embrace of a cylinder within a cylinder. If his theory were correct, the pressure would build up much more slowly in the cramped confines of the inner cylinder. If it were wrong, the discomfort would not bother him for long.

He would have to take his chances with time and space.

Three times he interrupted his preparations to call on Wilurzil.

She did not recognize him.

The ultimatums in forty languages he collected into a neat package, along with the Overseer’s translation, and left it for her. On the back of one of them he carefully lettered, in English, a brief message of thanks and farewell.

Someday perhaps she would overcome her horror and attempt to decipher it.

PART THREE

Chapter 1

Karvel lay in supine discomfort in the armor fashioned by the Bribs, and his only sensation was a growing awareness of a protruding seam under his right shoulder. The sharpening pain in his shoulder helped to alleviate the monotony.

Time passed.

Then the pressure began to tighten. Its first feathery touch was like a door opening on a half-forgotten nightmare, and slowly, ever so slowly, it intensified.

Suddenly Karvel felt a vibration. In an instant it had become a violent pulsation that shook the cylinder and set his armor to rattling noisily. Alarmed, he cautiously pressed upward. The cylinder opened.

The vibration cut off as he was squirming out of his armor. He dilated the U.O.’s hatch and looked out.

The U.O. was revolving slowly, but for the moment he ignored that phenomenon. Twice before he had witnessed the ravages of Force X, and neither time had it struck with the pulverizing speed and fury that now spiraled away from him.

He was looking out from the top of a low, wooded hill— what had been a wooded hill. It was now almost bare, except for stumps. The shredded trees had been flung far down the slope. Toward the bottom a few scattered trees remained standing, spared by the gap between the spirals, and Force X rushed on to spend itself on a bleak, featureless prairie.

Something moved in the distance, something the fury had missed. Karvel blinked at it. “Kangaroos?” he asked himself. The creatures did not hop, but walked with delicate, mincing steps, unaware of the crushing force that had just whipped past them.

Karvel ducked back inside and removed the U.O.’s critical activating instrument. He opened a supply cylinder and tucked the capsule into his knapsack. Then he squirmed through the hatch.

The U.O. was still revolving slowly, and the ground was three feet further down than he expected. The drop staggered him, and he backed off from the U.O., staring. It rested in a thick metal cup, like a golf ball on a tee, and the cup was revolving.

“A time beacon!” Karvel exclaimed.

A time beacon with a homing device, something to reach out through both time and space when the U.O. approached, and draw it back to its starting point. And the vibration. . .

“A signal,” Karvel pronounced. “I hope whoever receives it has the good sense to wait until Force X has run down.”

He circled the U.O. In one direction Force X was inflicting its final outrages on a sparse growth of trees. A small stream meandered toward him, curving around the base of the hill. In another direction the parched brown of the prairie merged with the horizon. Karvel moved on. A vast expanse of water gleamed in the distance, and the birds circling above it were slowly drifting specks in the sky. He moved again, and saw the water curve back to lose itself in the lush vegetation of an enormous swamp.

No direction looked promising, least of all the swamp; but from the swamp they came, bursting forth in a frenzied, stumbling rush. The vanguard suddenly went sprawling— perhaps Force X, now well above the ground, had whipped overhead—but it quickly regained its feet and floundered forward. They were too far away for Karvel to see them distinctly. They looked, in fact, like so many barrels scooting toward him, and that was indication enough that he’d found the unhuman beings.

Karvel thought wearily, “Another language to learn.”

Haskins should have sent a linguist.

He restrained the urge to dash out and meet them. A freakish, four-limbed creature such as himself was probably the last thing they expected to see. Instead he moved out of sight behind the U.O. and continued to watch.

Some ran on all six limbs, some on four. A few were upright on two, but their straining eagerness kept tipping them forward. Many of them had been carrying long poles—”Not nut poles again,” Karvel groaned—but they were losing them along the way.

A hundred yards from the hill they began to falter. By ones, by twos, by small groups they slowed to a halt, sifted forward, and finally arranged themselves in ranks, like ancient infantry massing for an assault.

Karvel retreated a short distance down the slope, seated himself on the shattered trunk of a tree, and waited. For a time he admired the distant, effortless soaring of a strange bird of slight body and enormous wingspread, and then he stared in disbelief at the buzzing gyrations of a cloud of enormous insects. Of all that he had seen, the tree whose trunk he was sitting on puzzled him the most. It was recognizably some ordinary species of elm.

When finally one of the creatures appeared, it did not approach the U.O. It moved directly toward Karvel and halted a long stride from him as others gathered just below the crest of the hill. Karvel, his carefully planned gesture of friendship forgotten, could do nothing but remain motionless and stare. Strange as the scientists’ description had been, it had not prepared him for the incredible weirdness he saw before him.

Then the thing spoke.

Its voice was as unbelievable as its appearance. Karvel thought instantly of a bagpipe, for the thick wheeze of its speech was projected against hissing tones reminiscent of a bagpipe’s drone. The sounds emerged from the creature’s abdomen; rather, they originated and remained there. Its speech reverberated inside its body, and the longer it spoke the more blurred the words became.

And it spoke—English! It said, “How. . .do. . .you. . .do. We. . .are. . .glad. . .to. . .see. . .you.”

Karvel managed to stammer a reply. “How do you do.”

“You. . .bring. . .fuel”

It was not a question, but Karvel, struggling valiantly to maintain his composure, answered weakly, “I brought some extra fuel—”

Suddenly the others surged forward to surround Karvel and thrust their strange limbs at him. He did not immediately understand what they wanted.

They wanted to shake hands.

He pushed himself erect and clasped the first
hand
he made contact with, a large, pliant, fingerless membrane with an oddly gripping surface that completely enfolded his hand, pressed gently, and withdrew. He accepted another. After the fortieth he lost count, but he estimated that there were at least a hundred unhuman beings surrounding him, a hundred headless, six-limbed creatures of a scant five feet of height, with enormously thick cylindrical bodies and with two small, fan-shaped appendages that jerked or flapped when they made sudden movements.

The last of them stepped back, and a long silence followed. Then the spokesman—the one who had first approached Karvel—broke it with another wheezing statement. “U.O.. . .did. . .this.”

It gestured at the devastated hillside. “We. . .do. . .not. . .know. . .it. . .” It paused pantingly. “. . .damages. We. . .regret. . .”

The voice faltered. Karvel interposed, “You mean you wouldn’t have sent it if you’d known? Where did you learn to speak English?”

“From. . .you.”

“From me!” Karvel exclaimed.

“We. . .come. . .from. . .far. . .place. . .”

“You learned English from
me?
I know that time travel is complicated, but don’t try to tell me I’ve been here before!”

“No. We. . .learn. . .now.”

Karvel considered that briefly, and decided to ignore it. “You come from a far place,” he mused. “Another sun? Another. . .galaxy?”

“Far. . .galaxy. Explore. Accident. . .destroys. . .fuel.”

“Ah! Now I understand. You were marooned here. Shipwrecked a long way from home, with no chance of rescue. I don’t suppose your people come this way often.”

“Never. . .come. . .here.”

“I understand. The only way you can get home again is to obtain more fuel, and spaceship service stations are hard to come by in this time and place. So you sent someone after it.”

“Future. . .evolution. . .”

“Evolution? Of course. If your messenger went far enough into the future, evolution would have developed an intelligent form of life that might be able to supply the fuel you need. I understand. And I understand, now, why the U.O. arrived with an empty tank. You had only a little fuel left, and you sent your messenger as far as it would take him.”

They remained grouped closely about him, some standing on two limbs and some on four. A few seated themselves, sitting as a dog would sit, their bodies braced by the middle pair of limbs.