The Fury Out of Time (3 page)

Karvel watched him approvingly. He would have to write a letter of appreciation for Lieutenant Phineas Ostrander— though he doubted that the base commander would believe it.

He suppressed an impulse to go to their assistance. His knee was already badly swollen. He was certain that he had at least one fractured rib, and he found himself wincing in anticipation of the occasional deep breath his body demanded. The gash in his head continued to ooze blood. He’d left his jacket at Whistler’s, and at this end of the valley, no longer warmed by the setting sun, he soon felt shudderingly cold. He started his motor and turned on the heater.

“There’s something I want to see while I can still hobble around,” he said, when Ostrander returned. “Carry on, you’re doing fine.”

At the neighboring farm only a corncrib had been damaged. Karvel sent the farmer and his three sons to help Ostrander, and drove on. Fallen trees partially blocked the road, but he managed to steer his car around them. He stopped once and painfully got out to examine a smashed car, but he paused only long enough to assure himself that the man, woman, and two children were all dead. He could not have gotten them out in any case—that would take torches or cutting tools.

He turned onto the valley road, edged his car around more fallen trees, and kept a firm grip on the brake handle during the steep descent. Twice he stopped briefly to look about. The pall of death hung heavily over the mangled fields. Cattle lay in clusters, their entrails smashed from their flattened bodies. A car was parked where the road leveled off, and pale-faced airmen were at work about a shattered farmhouse. They had recovered two bodies. The fury had commenced near this farm, and the awesome record of its force challenged the imagination. Buildings were pulverized, and enormous old trees had been flung to the ground.

A staff sergeant recognized Karvel and hurried over to report. Karvel waved him back to work. He pulled a piece of dead branch from a brush pile to use as a cane and limped haltingly across the road and into a pasture, pausing once to ponder the nature of a force that could snap fence posts and barbed wire. He reached the stream and splashed across it. Turning aside to avoid dead cattle and fallen trees, he moved painfully toward the first tree he had seen toppled.

He sat down on it and gazed unbelievingly at the shredded trunk and the splintered edge of the stump from which it had been wrenched. He was still sitting there an hour later when Colonel Frazier, the Hatch Air Force Base commander, strode up accompanied by his wing intelligence officer, Major Wardle. The colonel asked him what the hell he thought he was doing, and Karvel shook his head and did not answer.

He had seen the dullish-black sphere that rested in a hollow fifty feet away. It was some ten feet in diameter, and it had no more place in that quiet pasture than did the Empire State Building. Karvel had marveled at it, but he had been unable to investigate. By the time he’d reached the tree even a shallow breath was impaling him with pain, and he had the queasy feeling that he might pass out if he ventured one more step on his injured leg.

But he had found something close by that piqued his curiosity at least as much as the sphere. It was a butterfly, a tiny thing no larger than his thumbnail, that had alighted on the tree beside him. Karvel captured it before it could fly away, and he was still staring at it when the colonel arrived.

If the sphere was an improbable ornament to a rural landscape, this butterfly was a flat impossibility.

Chapter 2

Gerald Haskins sat quietly in a corner of Colonel Frazier’s office, chair tilted back against the wall, and puffed on a cigar. The colonels were arguing again, but Haskins was paying very little attention to them. He was really interested in only two kinds of people—those who could tell him what he wanted to know, and those who could do something he wanted done. These officers could not qualify on either count, but this neither surprised nor disappointed him. High-ranking officers were rarely of any value to Gerald Haskins, except in helping him to find the kinds of people who interested him.

He had flown out from Washington with two of them, Colonel Harlow Stubbins of Air Force Intelligence, and an Army Intelligence officer, Colonel James Rogers. Colonel Frazier had immediately taken them on a prolonged tramp about the countryside, and Haskins’s feet hurt. He did not resent this, but he doubted that it had been necessary. He was marking time until some of the people who interested him were ready to tell him something. Then—perhaps—he could decide what he wanted done.

Colonel Stubbins said peevishly, “I’m not going to be stampeded into any conclusions until I’ve had a talk with your Major Karvel.”

Colonel Frazier nodded agreement. “As you say, he
is
the most important eyewitness. I’ll warn you, though, that an interview with him isn’t going to clear up anything. Quite the contrary.”

The army colonel, who was displaying the reticence military etiquette seemed to demand of a guest in an alien domain, entered a mild protest. “You said he was a good man.”

“A very good man,” Colonel Frazier said. “I don’t think he’s ever had a commander who called him anything but brilliant. He’ll describe what he saw, and describe it very well, but even a good description is not an explanation.”

Haskins leaned forward. The front legs of his chair struck the floor with a thump that produced a trio of irritated scowls. “I’d like to see Major Karvel’s 201 file.”

“I don’t have it,” Colonel Frazier told him.

“The man is stationed at this base, and you don’t have—”

“He isn’t stationed here. He’s a retired officer—disability retired. It’s a tragic story. He was one of the new group of astronauts, and doing a tremendous job, as everyone who knew him expected. Then he got involved in a freak auto accident. Rather, he took to the ditch to avoid piling into an accident that had already taken place. He saved several lives, which I hope is some consolation to him because he lost a leg. Naturally NASA isn’t going to put a one-legged man on the moon, and our medical boards even take a dim view of one-legged men flying jets. Karvel could have had a responsible desk job with either NASA or the Air Force, but he refused. He’s just not the desk type. I suppose you’d say he couldn’t stand it to stay in the Air Force, but once he got out he couldn’t stay away from it. He’s been living in a nearby trailer camp, and I’m very much afraid he’s gotten himself onto a nonreversible treadmill to Hell. It’s a damned shame.”

Haskins broke off the twitch of suspicion he’d felt, and filed it. “Where
is
his 201 file?”

“At the Air Reserve Record Center, in Denver.”

“I’d like to skin your medical officer,” Colonel Stubbins said. “Why the devil did he have to operate this morning?”

Colonel Frazier smiled. “It didn’t occur to me to ask. The last time I questioned the judgment of a doctor was when I was a second lieutenant. It was also the first time. I learned—”

“I didn’t have to learn not to argue with a doctor,” Colonel Stubbins growled. “Nevertheless, what happened yesterday may be at least as important as what happened at Hiroshima back in 1945, and I don’t like having to sit here waiting for someone to tell me when I can talk to the one man who knows anything about it.”

“As far as Colonel Vukin is concerned, the only important consideration was that Karvel was badly injured and in considerable pain.”

“What sort of operation?” Haskins asked.

“Medial collateral ligament damage,” Frazier said. “In the knee. If you know what that means—I don’t. Karvel also had three broken ribs and a bad cut on the head, with a concussion. And an assortment of bad bruises. I suppose they sewed up his head. I don’t know what the ribs and the bruises required. According to Vukin, his principal means of transportation is going to be a wheel chair for some time to come. His left knee will be in a cast, and he won’t be able to use crutches because of the broken ribs. The amazing thing is how he accomplished as much as he did, considering the condition he was in. Vukin says the ribs alone should have made him a stretcher case.”

“All the more reason why we should see him as soon as possible,” Stubbins said. “The knock on the head didn’t impair his thinking?”

“No. He was his usual brilliant self right up to the moment Vukin put him under with an injection of something. The crew of surveyors was his idea. He thought the path of destruction was a perfect spiral, with that damned sphere—”

“Unidentified object,” Colonel Rogers murmured.

“—with the U.O. at dead center, and up to the last report he was absolutely right.”

“You should have questioned him when you had a chance,” Stubbins said.

“I told you he gave me a detailed description of what he saw. Force X travels with incredible speed. It forms a widening spiral with a widening gap. It knocks down trees and smashes buildings—as we saw. It makes no noise, and it’s invisible. Whistler told us almost as much, and none of it helps us to deduce what Force X is.”

Stubbins lifted his hands helplessly. “Let’s go down to Hangar Seven.”

The other colonels nodded, and got to their feet. Haskins remained seated, thoughtfully contemplating the stub of his cigar. “I’d like to make a phone call,” he said.

“Go ahead,” Colonel Frazier said, donating the office with a sweep of his hand.

“I’ll be along in a moment,” Haskins said.

He waited until the door closed after them, and then he went to the desk and gave the switchboard operator a Washington, D.C., number. When he reached his party he did not waste words. “Major Bowden Karvel.” He spelled it. “U. S. Air Force, disability retired. The works.”

Gerald Haskins had his own practical outlook on the general fitness of things, and “unidentified object” seemed a ridiculous misnomer for the heavily guarded sphere in Hangar Seven. To have a piece of apparatus securely enough in hand to commence dissecting it, and still be unable to label it with anything more aptly descriptive than U.O., was the height of military futility. He was happy that the dissecting was being done by his own bright young men, who were carefully drawn from the two kinds of people who interested him.

Hangar Seven was a small maintenance hangar, but its drafty dimensions still dwarfed the unidentified object into illusory insignificance. The sphere rested approximately in the center of the hangar, surrounded by workbenches, laboratory equipment, and seventeen puzzled scientists.

Colonel Stubbins strode up to the nearest bench and demanded, “Got anything yet?”

The scientists looked up at him, not startled but quietly disdainful, and unanimously decided to ignore him. Haskins kept his amusement to himself, wondering if soldiers would never learn that
civilian
is not necessarily a military rank below private.

He stopped to talk with a young scientist who seemed fascinated by a thick cylindrical object. “The controls?” he asked.

“One of them. A control capsule, I suppose you’d call it—or an instrument capsule. They snap in and out. Easily.”

The three officers gathered around them to listen.

“I don’t know if they’re machined, or cast, or stamped,” the scientist went on. “I’ve never seen anything like them. I also can’t find any way to disassemble them. We took one over to the hospital and had it X-rayed. Nothing. Maybe the case is lined with lead—or something. These capsules come in two sizes, of exactly the same shape except that they’re keyed. It would be impossible to put one into the wrong hole.”

“Any special significance to that?” Colonel Stubbins Wanted to know.

The scientist shrugged. “Perhaps not. Of course it could mean that the instruments are in some way expendable and have to be replaced frequently. Or that the U.O. is being mass-produced and the keys are to prevent assembly line errors. Or both.”

Stubbins blanched. “Mass-produced! All we’d need would be a fleet of these things, aimed at population centers!”

“So far we haven’t found any way to aim this one—if that’s any consolation,” the scientist said. “We also don’t understand what the controls are supposed to control—if they
are
controls. We have turned up one interesting point. That hole at the top of the instrument panel is definitely designed for one of these capsules. So one control, or one instrument, is missing.”

Stubbins looked at Frazier. “Did one of your men swipe a souvenir?”

“All my men have done is guard the thing. None of us, not even myself or Major Wardle, looked inside. Until Haskins’s men got here we didn’t even know how to open the hatch.”

“Karvel?”

“Never got within fifty feet of it, and it’s been under observation ever since he first saw it.”

“Could anyone have gotten into it before he saw it?”

“It’s possible,” Frazier admitted. “But I don’t think it’s very likely.”

“What about the men who were doing the rescue work?”

“I’ll have them asked,” Frazier said. “Yes, Sergeant?”

“Colonel Vukin called, sir. You can see Major Karvel now.”

“Tell him we’re on our way,” Frazier said. “Want to come, Haskins?”

Haskins nodded. “Mind if I bring a couple of people along?”

“I don’t mind. Vukin said he’d admit the four of us, and a stenographer, and that’s all. A hospital room is not, and I quote, ‘the Roman Coliseum.’ We also have a time limit— fifteen minutes.”