The Chalice of Death

by Robert Silverberg

  He called the central control tower and requested blast-off permission twelve minutes hence. That gave him ample time. He switched on the autopilot, stripped, and lowered himself into the nutrient bath.

  With quick foot-motions he set in motion the suspension mechanism. Needles jabbed at his flesh; the temperature began its downward climb. A thin stream of web came from the spinnerettes above him, wrapping him in unbreakable foam that would protect him from the hazards of high-acceleration blast-off.

  The drugs dulled his mind. He felt a faint chill as the temperature about him dropped below sixty. It would drop much lower than that, later, when he was asleep. He waited drowsily for sleep to overtake him.

  He was only fractionally conscious when blast-off came. He barely realized that the ship had left Earth. Before acceleration ended, he was totally asleep.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Hours ticked by, and Ewing slept. Hours lengthened into days, into weeks, into months. Eleven months, twelve days, seven and one half hours, and Ewing slept while the tiny ship speared along on its return journey.

  The time came. The ship pirouetted out of warp when the pre-set detectors indicated the journey had ended. Automatic computer units hurled the ship into fixed orbit round the planet below. The suspension unit deactivated itself; temperature gradually returned to normal, and a needle plunged into Ewing’s side, awakening him.

  He was home.

  After the immediate effects of the long sleep had worn off, Ewing made contact with the authorities below. He waited, hunched over the in-system communicator, staring through the vision-plate at the blue loveliness of his home planet.

  After a moment, a response came:

  “World Building, Corwin. We have your call. Please identify.”

  Ewing replied with the series of code symbols that had been selected as identification. He repeated them three times, reeling them off from memory.

  The acknowledging symbols came back instantly, after which the same voice said, “Ewing? At last!”

  “It’s only been a couple of years, hasn’t it?” Ewing said. “Nothing’s changed too much.”

  “No. Not too much.”

  There was a curious, strained tone in the voice that made Ewing feel uneasy, but he did not prolong the conversation. He jotted down the landing coordinates as they came in, integrated and fed them to his computer, and proceeded to carry out the landing.

  He came down at Broughton Spacefield, fifteen miles outside Corwin’s capital city, Broughton. The air was bright and fresh, with the extra tang that he had missed during his stay on Earth. After descending from his ship he waited for the pickup truck. He stared at the blue arch of the sky, dotted with clouds, and at the magnificent row of 800-foot-high Imperator trees that bordered the spacefield. Earth had no trees to compare with those, he thought.

  The truck picked him up; a grinning field hand said, “Welcome back, Mr. Ewing!”

  “Thanks,” Ewing said, climbing aboard. “It’s good to be back.”

  A hastily-assembled delegation was on hand at the terminal building when the truck arrived. Ewing recognized Premier Davidson, three or four members of the Council, a few people from the University. He looked around, wondering just why it was that Laira and his son had not come to welcome him home.

  Then he saw them, standing with some of his friends in the back of the group. They came forward, Laira with an odd little smile on her face, young Blade with a blank stare for a man he had probably almost forgotten.

  “Hello, Baird,” Laira said. Her voice was higher than he had remembered it as being, and she looked older than the mental image he carried. Her eyes had deepened, her face grown thin. “It’s so good to have you back. Blade, say hello to your father.”

  Ewing looked at the boy. He had grown tall and gangling; the chubby eight-year-old he had left behind had turned into a coltish boy of nearly eleven. He eyed his father uncertainly. “Hello—Dad.”

  “Hello there, Blade!”

  He scooped the boy off the ground, tossed him easily into the air, caught him, set him down. He turned to Laira, then, and kissed her. But there was no warmth in his greeting. A strange thought interposed:

  Am I really Baird Ewing?

  Am I the man who was born on Corwin, married this woman, built my home, fathered this child? Or did he die back on Earth, and am I just a replica indistinguishable from the original?

  It was a soul-numbing thought. He realized it was foolish of him to worry over the point; he wore Baird Ewing’s body, he carried Baird Ewing’s memory and personality. What else was there to a man, besides his physical existence and the tenuous Gestalt of memories and thoughts that might be called his soul?

  I am Baird Ewing, he insisted inwardly, trying to quell the doubt rising within him.

  They were all looking earnestly at him. He hoped none of his inner distress was visible. Turning to Premier Davidson, he said, “Did you get my messages?”

  “All three of them—there were only three, weren’t there?”

  “Yes,” Ewing said. “I’m sorry about those last two—”

  “It really stirred us up, when we got that message saying you were coming home without anything gained. We were really counting on you, Baird. And then, about four hours later, came the second message—”

  Ewing chuckled with a warmth he did not feel. “Something came up at the very last minute. Something that can save us from the Klodni.” He glanced around uncertainly. “What’s the news there? How about the Klodni?”

  “They’ve conquered Borgman,” Davidson said. “We’re next. Within a year, they say. They changed their direction after Lundquist—”

  “They got Lundquist too?” Ewing interrupted.

  “Lundquist and Borgman both. Six planets, now. And we’re next on the list.”

  Ewing shook his head slowly. “No; we’re not. They’re on our list. I’ve brought something back from Earth with me, and the Klodni won’t like it.”

  He went before the Council that evening, after having been allowed to spend the afternoon at home, renewing his acquaintance with his family, repairing the breach two years of absence had created.

  He took with him the plans and drawings and model he had wrung from Myreck and the College. He explained precisely how he planned to defeat the Klodni. The storm burst the moment he had finished.

  Jospers, the delegate from Northwest Corwin, immediately broke out with; “Time travel? Impossible!”

  Four of the other delegates echoed the thought. Premier Davidson pounded for order. Ewing shouted them down and said, “Gentlemen, I’m not asking you to believe what I tell you. You sent me to Earth to bring back help, and I’ve brought it.”

  “But it’s fantastic to tell us—”

  “Please, Mr. Jospers. This thing works.”

  “How do you know?”

  Ewing took a deep breath. He had not wanted to reveal this. “I’ve tried it,” he said. “I’ve gone back in time. I’ve talked face-to-face with myself. You don’t have to believe that, either. You can squat here like a bunch of sitting ducks and let the Klodni blast us the way they’ve blasted Barnholt and Borgman and Lundquist, and all the other colony worlds in this segment of space. But I tell you I have a workable defense here.”

  Quietly Davidson said, “Tell us this, Baird: how much will it cost us to build this—ah—weapon of yours, and how long will it take?”

  Ewing considered the questions a moment. He said, “I would estimate at least six to eight months of full-time work by a skilled group of engineers to make the thing work in the scale I intend. As for the cost, I don’t see how it could be done for less than three million stellors.”

  Jospers was on his feet in an instant. “Three million stellors! I ask you, gentlemen—”

  His question never was asked. In a voice that tolerated no interruptions, Ewing said, “I ask you, gentlemen—how much is life worth to you, and expensive nonsense as well. But what of the cost? In a year the Klodni will be here, and you
r economies won’t matter a damn. Unless you plan to beat them your own way, of course.”

  “Three million stellors represents twenty percent of our annual budget,” Davidson remarked. “Should your device prove to be of no help—”

  “Don’t you see?” Ewing shouted. “It doesn’t matter! If my device doesn’t work, there won’t be any more budgets for you to worry about!”

  It was an unanswerable point. Grudgingly, Jospers conceded, and with his concession the opposition collapsed. It was agreed that the weapon brought back from Earth by Ewing would be built. There was no choice. The shadow of the advancing Klodni grew longer and longer on the stars, and no other weapon existed. Nothing known to man could stop the advancing hordes.

  Possibly, something unknown could.

  Ewing had been a man who enjoyed privacy, but now there was no privacy for him. His home became a perpetual open house; the ministers of state were forever conferring with him, discussing the new project. People from the University wanted to know about Earth. Publishers prodded Ewing to write books for them; magazines and telestat firms

  He refused them all. He was not interested in capitalizing on his trip to Earth.

  He spent most of his time at the laboratory that had been given him in North Broughton, supervising the development of the time projector. He had no formal scientific training himself; the actual work was under the control of a staff of engineers from the University. But he aided them with suggestions and theoretical contributions, based on his conversations with Myreck and his own experiences with the phenomenon of time transfer.

  The weeks passed. At home, Ewing found family life strained and tense. Laira was almost a stranger to him; he told her what he could of his brief stay on Earth, but he had earlier determined to keep the account of his time-shift to himself forever, and his story was sketchy and inconsistent.

  As for Blade, he grew used to his father again. But Ewing did not feel comfortable with either of them. They were, perhaps, not really his; and, preposterous though the thought was, he could not fully accept the reality of his existence.

  There had been other Ewings. He was firmly convinced he had been the first of the four, that the others had merely been duplicates of him, but there was no certainty in that. And two of those duplicates had given up their lives so that he might be home on Corwin.

  He brooded over that, and also about Myreck and about Earth. Earth, which by now was merely a Sirian protectorate. Earth, which had sent her boldest sons forth to the stars, and had withered her own substance at home.

  He saw pictures of the devastation on Lundquist and Borgman. Lundquist had been a pleasure world, attracting visitors from a dozen worlds to its games parlors and lovely gardens, luminous and radiant. The pictures showed the lacy towers of Lundquist’s dreamlike cities crumbling under the merciless Klodni guns. Senselessly, brutally, the Klodni were moving forward.

  Scouts checked their approach. The fleet was massed on Borgman, now. If they held to their regular pattern, it would be nearly a year before they rumbled out of the Borgman system to make their attack on nearby Corwin. And a year would be enough time.

  Ewing counted the passing days. The conical structure of the time-projector took shape slowly, as the technicians, working from Myreck’s model, carried out their painstaking tasks. No one asked exactly how the weapon would be put in use. Ewing had specified that it be installed in a space ship, and it had been designed accordingly.

  At night he was haunted by the recurring image of the Ewing who had willingly thrown himself under the jets of a descending spaceliner. It could have been me, he thought. I volunteered. But he wanted to toss for it.

  And there had been another Ewing, equally brave, whom he had never known. The man who had taken the steps that would render him superfluous, and then had calmly and simply removed himself from existence.

  I didn’t do that. I figured the others would be caught in the wheel forever, and that I’d be the only one who would get loose. But it didn’t happen that way.

  He was haunted too, by the accusing stare in Myreck’s eyes as the twin Corwinites plundered the College of its secrets and abandoned Earth to its fate. Here, again, Ewing had his rationalizations: there was nothing he could have done to help. Earth was the prisoner of its own woes.

  Laira told him finally that he had changed, that he had become bitter, almost irascible, since making the journey to Earth.

  “I don’t understand it, Baird. You used to be so warm, so—so human. And you’re different now. Cold, turned inward, brooding all the time.” She touched his arm lightly. “Can’t you talk things out with me? Something’s troubling you. Something that happened on Earth, maybe?”

  He whirled away. “No! Nothing.” He realized his tone was harsh; he saw the pain on her face. In a softer voice he said, “I can’t help myself, Laira. There’s nothing I can say. I’ve been under a strain, that’s all.”

  The strain of seeing myself die, and of seeing a culture die. Of journeying through time and across space. I’ve been through a lot. Too much, maybe.

  He felt very tired. He looked up at the night sky as it glittered over the viewing-porch of their home. The stars were gems mounted on black velvet. There were the familiar constellations, the Turtle and the Dove, the Great Wheel, the Spear. He had missed those configurations of stars while he was on Earth. They had seemed to him friendly aspects of home.

  But there was nothing friendly about the cold stars tonight. Ewing held his wife close and stared up at them, and it seemed to him that they held a savage menace. As if the Klodni hordes hovered there like moisture particles in a rain cloud, waiting for their moment to descend.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The alarm came early on a spring morning, a year after Ewing had returned to Corwin. It was a warm, muggy morning. A soft rain was falling, automatically energizing the deflectors on the roof of Ewing’s home; their polarizing cells kept the rain from tattooing on the flat roof. Ewing lay in uneasy sleep.

  The phone rang. He stirred, turned over, buried his face in the pillow. He was dreaming of a figure limned briefly in a white flare of jet exhaust on Valloin Spacefield. The phone continued to ring.

  Groggily, Ewing felt a hand shaking him. A voice—Laira’s voice—was saying, “Wake up, Baird! There’s a call for you! Wake up!”

  Reluctantly, he came awake. The wall clock said 0430. He rubbed his eyes, crawled out of the bed, groped his way across the room to the phone extension. He choked back a yawn.

  “Ewing here. What is it?”

  The sharp, high-pitched tones of Premier Davidson cut into his sleep-drugged mind. “Baird, the Klodni are on their way!”

  He was fully awake now. “What?”

  “We just got word from the scout network,” Davidson said. “The main Klodni attacking fleet left Borgman about four hours ago, and there are at least five hundred ships in the first wave.”

  “When are they expected to reach this area?”

  “We have conflicting estimates on that. It isn’t easy to compute super-light velocities. But on the basis of what we know, I’d say they’ll be within firing range of Corwin in not less than ten nor more than eighteen hours, Baird.”

  Ewing nodded. “All right. Have the special ship serviced for immediate blast-off. I’ll drive right out to the spaceport and pick it up there.”

  “Baird—”

  “What is it?” Ewing asked impatiently.

  “Don’t you think—well, that some younger man should handle this job? I don’t mean that you’re old, but you have a wife, a son—and it’s risky. One man against five hundred ships? It’s suicide, Baird.”

  The word triggered dormant associations in Ewing, and he winced. Doggedly he said, “The Council has approved what I’m doing. This is no time to train someone else. We’ve been over this ground before.”

  He dressed rapidly, wearing, for sentiment’s sake, the blue-and-gold uniform of the Corwin Space Force, in which he had served the mandatory two-year
term a dozen years before. The uniform was tight, but still fitted.

  While Laira fixed a meal he stood by a window, looking outward at the gray, swirling, pre-dawn mists. He had lived so long in the shadow of the Klodni advance that he found it hard to believe the day had actually come.

  He ate moodily, scarcely tasting the food as he swallowed it, saying nothing.

  Laira said, “I’m frightened, Baird.”

  “Frightened?” He chuckled. “Of what?”

  She did not seem amused. “Of the Klodni. Of this crazy thing you’re going to do.” After a moment she added, “But you don’t seem afraid, Baird. And I guess that’s all that matters.”

  “I’m not,” he said truthfully. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. The Klodni won’t even be able to see me. There isn’t a mass-detector in the universe sensitive enough to spot a one-man ship a couple of light-years away. The mass is insignificant; and there’ll be too much background noise coming out of the fleet itself.”

  Besides, he added silently, how can I be afraid of these Klodni?

  They were not even human. They were faceless, mindless brutes, a murdering ant-horde marching through the worlds out of some fierce inner compulsion to slay. They were dangerous, but not frightening.

  Fright had to be reserved for the real enemies—the human beings who turned against other humans, who played a double game of trust and betrayal. There was cause to respect the strength of the Klodni, but not to dread them for it. Dread was more appropriate applied to Rollun Firnik and his kind, Ewing thought.

  When he had eaten, he stopped off briefly in Blade’s bedroom to take a last look at the sleeping boy. He did not wake him. He merely looked in, smiled, and closed the door.

  “Maybe you should wake him up and say goodbye,” Laira suggested hesitantly.

  Ewing shook his head. “It’s too early. He needs his sleep at his age. Anyway, when I get back I guess I’ll be a hero. He’ll like that.”

  He caught the expression on her face, and added, “I am coming back. You could gamble our savings on it.”