The Imprisoned Earth

by Vaughn Heppner

  “What am I thinking?” I asked, surprised by his claim.

  Calidore told me how we could get the temporal shifter without going deep underwater in subterranean chambers.

  I nodded, stunned by his idea. It was brilliant and crazy. “Huh,” I said. “I hadn’t figured it as finely as you have. But that’s close enough. I did have a similar basic idea.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Calidore said. “I just miscalculated. I thought you knew. Now, you’re trying to bullshit me by lying. You had no idea what to do. I just accidentally gave it away.”

  “Why Doctor Calidore, such language from such an exalted mentalist as yourself…”

  “Salty talk for a salty moment,” Calidore said, recovering his poise. “Supposing we can gain the artifact, how do you plan on getting past the mentalist and his company?”

  “That, my dear Doctor, we’re going to have to discover the hard way when the time comes.”

  “You mean you don’t know yet.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  -41-

  We’d come full circle, landing at precisely the same spot as when the Avanti had beamed us from the Solar System to Aiello. We knew, because Calidore had recorded the event and location in his computer memory.

  The sky-raft rested on shifting sand. I looked around, but it wasn’t the same as when we’d first landed. This looked like present-day Aiello.

  “What was different the first time?” I asked.

  “Eh?”

  “The transporting beam,” I said.

  “Oh. I see what you mean. The beam must have triggered the temporal shifter or triggered something here that shifted us back in time, or allowed us to view the distant past. I’m afraid we’re out of luck, then. We lack any means of duplicating the Arch Ship transport beam.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “I mean yes, we have no transport beam, but what was it about the beam that activated the ancient device? Maybe we could duplicate that.”

  “A new assumption,” Calidore said. “I must analyze this.”

  “It’s too late,” Schaine said. “Look!” She pointed at the pink sky.

  I saw specks in the distance. The haulers were coming again. This time, we lacked even antimissile batteries and throngs of Fighting Hunge with machine guns to help us.

  “The game is up,” Calidore said.

  “You little bastard,” I said, drawing my laser pistol. “I can still burn you.”

  “What would vaporizing me gain you?”

  “Intense satisfaction from watching you die,” I said.

  “That is an ignoble attitude.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but it’s pure me, and at least I get one of my desires before I go.”

  “Just a minute, just a minute,” Calidore said. “I believe I may have overlooked a factor. There is something to your idea about the Avanti transfer beam having peculiar properties. Some of them we may be able to duplicate. I believe if I recalibrate the anti-gravity pods on our sky-raft to a different setting—”

  An odd vibration emanated from the computer slate. That vibration rose in pitch from our sky-raft to such a degree that Schaine clapped her hands over her ears.

  “If this is a trick…” I said, my trigger finger tightening.

  “Put that away,” Calidore said. “You’re making me nervous and thereby disrupting my concentration.”

  “That can happen to a computer?”

  “It’s a figure of speech. Now, quickly, pick me up and move three feet to the left.”

  I did as instructed.

  “Do we let Lord Ra have Schaine?” he asked.

  I reached over and grabbed her hand, yanking her beside me.

  “Now, one step sideways to the left,” Calidore said.

  I did, pulling Schaine with us, and I felt disoriented. The sensation worsened, and the world turned hazy around me. Calidore might have spoken, but the words became garbled. The sky changed colors, becoming more intensely pink. A comet streaked across the sky. Clouds billowed into existence and disappeared. I shut my eyes as dizziness threatened to cause me to hurl what food I had in my gut onto the sky-raft.

  Then, I noticed that the sky-raft was gone. I don’t know how that happened. I didn’t lurch downward either onto sand as if from a height, which seemed like what should have happened.

  Finally, everything around me stabilized, and I heard Calidore again.

  “There,” the computer slate said. “Look around. Tell me what you see. My sensors seem to be distorted.”

  I opened my eyes, and I think my jaw dropped. I stood on hard red rock. In the distance was the Kurgech Mountains. To one side was a fern forest where dinosaurs might have roamed. I looked in the direction opposite the mountains and spied the odd box city.

  “Oh,” Schaine said. “That place is ugly.”

  I nodded absently because all my focus was on the disc-shaped spaceship standing out there on four struts, between the box city and us. Gorths were supposed to have built the city, I guess.

  “Are you seeing that?” I asked Calidore.

  “My sensors are on the fritz,” he said. “Describe what you’re viewing.”

  I did, telling him about the ramp that came down from the center of the craft. I didn’t see any crewmembers about. Could the ship—a spaceship, I thought—be empty?

  “Why do you call it a spaceship?” Calidore asked.

  “What else could it be?”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  I frowned. “Do you think the temporal shifter is on the ship?”

  “I’m not suggesting that. I’m saying the craft may be able to take us to the shifter.”

  “Ahhh…” I said. “Can we walk there?”

  “Let me reflect,” Calidore said. “Hmm, I believe this tiny area where we’re standing is a glitch in a Masters’ temporal shifter. It’s a window, as it were, into the past. Remember, we learned that parts of the Kurgech Mountains seemed cursed to the inhabitants?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “This spot is part of that haunting. Yes, I believe we can walk to the ship out there if we do so in an exact manner that I have yet to determine. I think others can also come down onto this spot, just as sky-shark men once did when they fired their machine guns at you.”

  “How does this all work, Doctor?”

  “I don’t know yet. The temporal shifter is a device of the ancients, the Masters in particular. But if we’re going to best the Avanti and gain back my body and your world, we have to work fast.”

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s get started.”

  -42-

  It proved to be a long walk trudging across sand. At no time during the journey did we see any aliens; the Gorths Calidore had spoken about.

  “We should have taken the sky-raft,” I said, mopping sweat from my face with a sleeve.

  “How would we have done that?” Calidore asked. “The sky-raft had vanished, remember?”

  “Oh. Yeah. You’re right. Why did that happen?”

  “If you figure it out, tell me,” Calidore said. “I feel adrift in this realm and by this entire process. Do you know that my sensors still cannot detect anything except for you, Schaine and the sand?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I sense the ground, but I do not ‘see’ mountains, fern forests, box cities or landed spaceships.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. I’m seeing those things just fine.”

  “I have been analyzing possibilities for the dichotomy for some time. I believe I finally have a working theory.”

  I nodded.

  “I am a machine. I sense what is there. My sensors cannot fool me the way eyes and ears can fool a human.”

  “You’re saying the spaceship out there, the box city and the fern forest aren’t real?”

  “Not in the sense that they are in the same reality as you and I,” Calidore said.

  “You’d better explain that.”

  “The most elegant explanation is th
at we’re ghosts moving through time past.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You couldn’t say it any more elegantly than that.”

  “Sarcasm will not aid us now.”

  “Why can I see those things and you can’t?”

  “Because your eyes are not exactly like my sensors,” Calidore said. “At times, the human brain can make patterns—or sense—out of random events, such as the Big Dipper in Terra’s night sky. I submit that you are not actually seeing things how you think you are. I believe they’re ghostly to you or insubstantial, shall we say. Your mind or brain is making patterns you can understand. That is what allows you to move through this ghostly time past as if it were real.”

  “What do you sense out there?”

  “I might call them ‘time eddies,’” Calidore said “—although that is an imprecise term.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Schaine, do you understand any of what he’s saying?”

  “He has spoken to me about this in the past. The seer could not see the first time what you saw. Thus, he didn’t understand your story the first time you told it. If our brains can see these things that only have a limited reality…doesn’t that give us an advantage over machines?”

  I cocked my head. Schaine’s keen reasoning surprised me.

  “I’m not all legs and boobs,” she said.

  “I guess not,” I said, bemused.

  “Maybe Schaine has a point,” Calidore said. “Perhaps…I’m not sure. Perhaps this process needs an ordinary human. A mentalist or a machine could not apprehend what is happening, or believe in it enough to act purposefully in this realm. Your theory concerning the super-intelligence of the Avanti has started to grow on me. Maybe Wolf Clan warriors are more mystical than you realize. Whatever the case, this is the only game in town for us. Let us see what we can accomplish by following through to the conclusion.”

  In other words, we continued to trudge. The bright white sun felt hot enough to be real. My thirstiness felt real, too. Yet, why couldn’t Calidore detect the things we saw? Could we—or I—be caught in a mentalist illusion? Was I still connected to the mind machine Lord Ammon had used on me? I didn’t like the idea I’d been running through a fantasy all this time. In fact…I rejected the idea. Even if this was a ghostly realm, as Calidore suggested, it had the real feel that being awake brings and that no dream ever possessed.

  Besides, I did not believe that Ammon could have tricked me to that extent. My reality just now had too many…confirmations for this to be a machine-induced mind-fantasy.

  After a while, the oval ship loomed before us, resting still on its four struts. The craft was much larger than I’d initially realized. It was monstrous, with a gigantic ramp leading down to the sand. Or, from our perspective, leading up from the sand.

  Schaine halted abruptly.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She pointed at the ramp.

  “What?” I asked with a quizzical look.

  She stared at me, licked her lips as if mentally confirming her resolve and turned back to the ramp. She took a step forward before halting and whimpering, shaking her head.

  “She sees something on the ramp,” Calidore said. “Her reactions say so, at least.”

  “Is that true, Schaine?”

  “Yes,” she said in a small voice.

  I squinted at the ramp. It was empty. “What do you see?”

  “Vehicles,” she said in a soft voice. “Horrible crews drive them down the ramp.”

  “Describe the crew,” Calidore said.

  “Big ugly things with bald green warty heads,” she said. “They have slit mouths and slit noses, and their eyes burn brightly…each eye is like a lamp. I cannot stare into their eyes.”

  “I’m checking my data banks,” Calidore said. “Ah. This is interesting. She has just described Gorths.”

  “Servants of the Masters?” I asked.

  “Precisely,” Calidore said.

  “Is she hallucinating, do you think?”

  “Doubtful,” Calidore said. “Perhaps Schaine can see this reality better than even you. Consider. She is less logical than you, more emotional and emotionally driven. Her mind can likely accept unacceptable or irrational events easier than even you can. Thus, she can see better into the ghostly or time-eddied past than either you or I.”

  “Can the ghostly vehicles or aliens hurt us?” I asked.

  “Perhaps only to the extent that we believe in them,” Calidore said.

  “Schaine could illusion herself to death?”

  “A crude way to say it, but possibly so,” he said.

  I debated for several seconds, finally turning to Schaine. “Are you game?” I asked.

  “You want to do it here?” she asked, shocked but obviously considering it.

  I shook my head. “Are you willing to enter the ship with me?”

  “I am, Jason. Where you go, I’ll go.”

  I took a breath, a step forward—and the entire world shuddered. Something like a wave went through reality as the ground shifted underneath us.

  “What was that?” Calidore demanded. “I sensed something odd.”

  “You saw that?” I asked.

  “Jason,” Schaine said, shaking my arm, pointing at the ramp.

  I turned and blanched as I saw them too, big military vehicles like WWII halftracks clanking down the ramp of the great Gorth ship. The ugly green beasts with slits for noses drove them. They wore gray uniforms. A few had hats on their warty bald green heads.

  “They’ve solidified,” Schaine whispered. “One of them—one of them is pointing at us. Down, Jason, get down.”

  Schaine dragged me down so we crouched on the sand.

  I looked at the ramp and could make out a Gorth standing in a halftrack, pointing. He wasn’t pointing at us, though, but beyond us, at something in the desert.

  I turned. “Doctor—a sky-raft is sliding across the desert, coming toward us.”

  “I see it,” Calidore said. “It’s one of Lord Ra’s rafts. I detect—I detect Mentalist Ra and twenty-one neutraloids aboard the raft. They’re coming fast and will be here soon. If I can detect them—”

  Machine gun fire chattered in the far distance.

  “They’re firing at us,” I shouted. “Come on, we have to get out of here. They can obviously see us.”

  I already held Calidore and now grabbed one of Schaine’s hands. I dragged her to her feet, and together we raced for the Gorth ship that seemed more real every step I took closer to it.

  -43-

  We fled across the desert toward the landed Gorth ship. The big ugly standing in a halftrack and pointing at the approaching sky-raft didn’t seem to notice us. He concentrated on the raft as it picked up speed and caused clouds of dust and sand to billow from its low passage.

  “I have a new theory,” Calidore said.

  “Yeah?” I said between gasps.

  “Unlike us and for reasons I have not yet determined, Lord Ra was able to bring a sky-raft through the temporal distortion rift. He’s also brought more biological entities through, namely, twenty-one neutraloids. In some manner, that must solidify his existence here in the distant past. If not that, it brings him closer in time to the—”

  “In temporal sync with the Gorths,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, what an excellent way to put it,” Calidore exclaimed. “Greater mass must help align the two time phases, bringing them into sync. That is an elegant thought. I wonder if that is a latent idea embedded by the Avanti into your mind.”

  “Or I’m just clever like that,” I panted.

  “Not as likely,” Calidore said, “but I suppose one mustn’t discount the possibility out of hand—although my original idea seems more reasonable.”

  “Schaine,” I said, shaking her hand. “I want you to close your eyes.”

  “Why?” asked Calidore. “She’ll stumble doing that.”

  “She won’t see the vehicles or the Gorths that way,” I shouted.
“Maybe we can just zip up the ramp then without worrying about the aliens.”

  “No, no, no,” Calidore said. “It doesn’t work like that. Your eyes are merely sight organs. You have four other senses, and possibly a sixth sense humans normally leave dormant. Closing your eyes won’t stop the other senses from detecting the ghostly signals. She’ll bump into the vehicles—for they seem to be in greater alignment or temporal sync with us, too.”

  “Fine,” I panted. “Ready to run into the ship?”

  Schaine nodded even as she stared at me in fright.

  I glanced back at the sky-raft. It was already halfway to us from when I’d last looked.

  Schaine and I started up the ramp, and I was surprised that my feet didn’t sink into the material, as it did have a ghostly or cloudy sponginess to it. The ramp was a city block in length with eight of the big halftrack vehicles on it. I could barely hear them, as if they were down the length of a spyglass turned the wrong way, making the image tiny instead of bigger. In this case, the distance allowed less sound to reach us, or me.

  “This is surreal,” Schaine panted, as she stared at the nearest vehicle and its occupants.

  Once or twice, a Gorth glanced in our general direction, frowned, scratched his bald warty head and then shrugged or closed his eyes and shook his head—the way a drunkard might knowing he was seeing hallucinations.

  “Wait a minute,” Calidore said. “I—I just detected something.”

  “The Gorths are all around us,” I said.

  “No, no, not them,” Calidore said. “The time eddies: I can detect them just fine now. I’m finally detecting a source for the eddies.”

  “You mean the temporal shifter itself?” I asked.

  “I think so,” Calidore said. “It’s…one thousand, sixty-three meters away and one hundred and sixteen meters above us.”

  I calculated roughly. “That’s inside the middle of the craft,” I said.

  “I suspected that would be the case,” Calidore said. “Perhaps I can direct you through the corridors.”

  “You can see them?”

  “Why would you think that all of a sudden?” Calidore asked. “I merely know the location of our quest. Everything else is waves of time distortions.”