I’d probably never know the answer.
In the days that followed every one of the Wendel agents were rounded up and returned to Earth to stand trial. I never did find out the identity of the agent who had shot the dart at me from high up on the spiral or the one who had sent a little mechanical killer in my direction by the shores of Lake Michigan in New Chicago.
It didn’t worry me at all, because I was sure that both of those delightful characters were among the agents who had been rounded up in the mopping up operations.
Oh, yes—they rescued her with her hair in disarray and no longer standing high up on her head. Three days later, drifting through empty space about three hundred thousand miles from Mars. She’s in prison now and will have to answer charges. But I intend to go all out in the plea I’ll make in her defense when she comes up for trial.
Some judges are enlightened and merciful and others are harsh tyrants, but with the backing of the Board I’m not too worried about the outcome. If it goes against us, I’ll take it to the highest court in the land, and the backing of the Board carries plenty of weight there too.
Eventually I forgave Commander Littlefield.
“I’m a hard man, Ralph,” he said, standing in the starlight outside the Port Administration Section with a crumpled sheet of paper in his hand, right after he’d received assurances from Earth he’d be placed in command of a new sky ship. “I did what I did because I am what I am. I knew that her life hung in the balance, that every word we exchanged increased the danger. But when I weighed that against the future of the Colony—I felt I had no choice. I knew what a full confession would mean to us.”
I never saw Nurse Cherubin again. She married her doctor and they were honeymoon passengers on the next scheduled Earth trip, which took place while I was busy making sure that the whole Wendel Combine would come apart at the seams. It was a little like watching a volcanic explosion and keeping the lava flow channeled with the full weight of the Board’s authority.
Joan and I have become Martian Colony residents for the duration. I mean by that there will always be new battles to be fought in a war that will never end…as long as Man stays a part of the universe. There’s something embattled about him that you don’t find in any other species. Maybe it’s good and maybe it’s bad, but it helps to explain why he keeps building for the future, He never knows—and just not knowing makes him want to build as sturdily as he can.
You never prize anything so much as when you feel you’re about to lose it. So you fight to preserve it, and when you’ve done that you’ve built up enough excess energy to want to make a stab at something better. And when that’s threatened you’ll fight again and so on until the final curtain.
It’s just the way things are.
THE THREE FACES OF TIME
Originally published in 1969.
PRELUDE
It came sweeping down from high in the sky, huge and flat and triangular, and looking not unlike a wedge of wild geese winging their way southward.
Autumn sportsmen far below, bobbing about in rubber boats on the salt estuaries that fringed the coastline, thought for a moment that the painted ducks they had been intent on bagging were about to be replaced by a rarer prize, as they heard a faint, honking noise as it swept across the marshes at an elevation of two hundred feet.
Rifles came up, and here and there, where the ground was firm, hunting dogs bounded forward in keen anticipation. A few went plunging into the silt of the marshes, or swam between bullrushes to the crackle of premature rifle fire.
But the flying wedge kept on and on, ignoring the plastic decoys scattered across the shining water and catching the sunlight in blinding flashes.
And suddenly the sun emerged from behind a cloud and shone full on it, altering its three-cornered shape and revealing it for what it was—an enormous, silvery circular disk, moving with great speed across the sky.
CHAPTER ONE
“George, something is moving around in the garden,” Helen Wentworth said, tugging at her husband’s arm and awakening him from a pleasant sleep of fifteen minutes duration. “It’s making a thrashing sound. It can’t be a skunk. When I opened the window and looked out, all of the shrubery was moving, from the front porch to Mrs. Jackson’s washlines.”
Wentworth opened his eyes and looked at her. Her hair wabs in curlers, and she had smeared cold cream on her face, which shone in the moonlight that was streaming into the room from the window which she had just thrown open.
She was trembling a little and he reached out quickly and drew her close to him. Somehow she had never seemed quite so beautiful.
He started kissing her hair and lips and eyes, but she took firm hold of his wrists and forced him to release her.
“George, I’m frightened,” she said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t be, but if there’s a man out there…”
“Now, now, take it easy,” Wentworth said, raising himself on one elbow. “You know how often bears come down from the mountain and nose around, looking for something to nibble on. Or it could be a deer…or just a gust of wind stirring the shrubbery.”
“There’s not a breath of air stirring,” Helen Wentworth said, positively. “It would have to be a man, or a terribly big animal. When was the last time we saw a bear? Three years ago, wasn’t it? And it was just a cub.”
“There are plenty of grown bears around,” Wentworth said. “If it will make you feel any better, I’ll go down to the garden and have a look. Where did you hang my dressing gown?”
“It’s in the hall closet. But please, darling…I don’t want you to go outside. If it’s a man and he sees you…”
“He’ll probably disappear fast,” Wentworth said, reassuringly. “There’s nothing a burglar fears more than a property owner with a gun. I have the right to shoot to kill and burglars are seldom that suicidal.”
“But you haven’t a gun. You’ve never wanted to have one about the house. And if he’s armed you’ll be taking a terrible risk. I won’t let you do it.”
“I’m not afraid, darling,” Wentworth said. “And that counts in my favor. I’ll make him think I have a gun. Just stay right where you are, and don’t worry.”
Before his wife could protest further, Wentworth was out of the room and striding down the hall to the clothes closet. He snatched his dressing gown, shrugged into it, and descended the stairs to the living room, making a gun-shaped bulge in the garment with his tightly clenched fists. He crossed quickly to the kitchen and slipped quietly out into the garden, letting the screen door swing shut behind him, but taking care to leave it unlatched.
There was not much light, the moon was veiled by fleecy clouds. He could just make out the outlines of the hedge which separated Mrs. Jackson’s cottage from his own, and the vast, forested bulk of Thunder Mountain looming up in the near distance.
He cursed himself for not having thought to bring along a flashlight. It would have made a more realistic simulated pistol than the bulge made by his fist in his dressing gown; and he could have used it to send spirals of light boring into the shrubbery and keep a dangerous intruder at bay by half-blinding him. If the intruder were a bear, a flashlight would have been invaluable.
He stood very still for a moment, listening, straining his ears to catch the slightest stir of movement. The foliage did not appear to be in motion. There were no rustling sounds at all—the wind that had been blowing all afternoon had died down before nightfall and the air now seemed almost stagnant.
After a moment, he did hear the small sounds of the night—the chirp of a solitary cricket, the faint scurrying to and fro of some small animal, probably a rodent, and the murmur of the narrow, winding brook that passed under a wooden footbridge eighty feet to the right of his property.
He remained just outside the kitchen door for two minutes, then began to advance cautiously into the garden. He moved in the direction of the hedge beyo
nd which Mrs. Jackson customarily hung out her wash on weekdays. The wash was an eyesore which he had always tried not to resent, for Mrs. Jackson was pathetically gnarled and aged, and the soul of kindness.
He stopped only once, when a twig was crushed by his heel and crackled like a tiny pistol shot. Small animals seldom make loud cracklings and he realized that it would have been a dead giveaway if an intruder had remained unaware of his presence up to that moment.
When nothing happened, he continued on until he was two-thirds of the way to the hedge.
It happened then, the thing that he had been dreading. Something huge and dark and swift-moving arose directly in his path and leapt straight toward him, gripping him by the shoulder and hurling him backwards.
He was hurled completely off-balance—he crashed to the ground, his arms flailing the empty air, unable to do more than cushion the violence of the fall by twisting sharply sideways an instant before the impact sent agonizing pain lancing through him.
So jarring was the impact that he might have fractured his spine if he had landed flat on his back, for the ground there was stone-hard. He was convinced for a moment that he was seriously injured. The pain increased and spread before it lessened, and when he tried to rise he felt numb all over.
He managed to raise himself slightly. But before he could overcome the dizziness that had come upon him, strong relentless hands gripped him by the elbows and dragged him to his feet.
It was more than dizziness, for he could see nothing clearly. It was as if his vision had undergone a distortion, as if his pupils had been widened by the violence of the fall and had remained dilated.
Despite his helplessness, he cried out in anger and jerked his shoulders about in a frantic effort to free himself. But the steel-firm fingers of the intruder who had dragged him to his feet continued to tighten, biting so cruelly into his flesh that he was forced to allow himself to be propelled forward through the darkness toward the hedge. Twice he stumbled and almost fell again, and once his right knee gave way, causing him to lurch so violently that the intruder came to an abrupt halt and he gained a momentary respite.
He gradually became aware that there was more than one intruder. Hovering a short distance from the hedge were five tall figures with features that were vaguely hawk-like. They held themselves very straight and they kept coming closer to him and then darting away again, with swift gliding movements, as if they were skating on a sheet of ice.
Their bodies glistened, and he could not shake off the feeling that they were either covered with scales or clothed in some material of shining texture that would have glowed, more brightly in the daylight then it did at night.
Distant objects stood out clearly and he could see the row of tall pines at the base of Thunder Mountain that he had transformed, in a fantasy of his childhood, into mysterious sentinels from another planet, perpetually standing guard. The fact that so remote a memory had crept into his mind at that particular moment struck a chill to his heart, for it seemed to have a significance that went beyond the present.
There was an opening in the hedge and beyond it the smooth grass of Mrs. Jackson’s backyard. The intruder propelled Wentworth forward through the hedge and across the lawn until he was staggering along at the edge of a road that spiraled upwards toward Thunder Mountain. Mrs. Jackson’s house was the last village dwelling before the forested slopes of the mountain spread a veil of unbroken greenery over the landscape.
If Mrs. Jackson had been peering out of an upstairs window at that moment she would have seen Wentworth moving out into the middle of the road with five tall, hawk-featured figures in his wake who seemed more to glide than to walk, and another accompanying him with a firm grip on his arms, which he was relentlessly twisting. She would have seen Wentworth’s stumbling figure shrink into the distance until it dimmed and vanished.
Helen Wentworth, having waited ten minutes for her husband to come back into the house and ascend the stairs, decided that she could endure the suspense no longer. She had remained by a rear window, staring down into the garden, and she had seen him move out from the kitchen door and start to cross the garden. But then the clouds which obscured the moon had shifted a little and the faint glow which had enabled her to see as far as the hedge had vanished.
Her heart had come into her throat then, for it was pure torture to try to imagine what might be taking place in the darkness. She was almost positive that he had not been attacked by a bear or a human prowler, or he would have cried out and there would have been the sounds of a scuffle. But still…what could be keeping him so long?
Her first impulse was to go downstairs and out into the garden, disregarding the fact that he would not have liked that at all. He loved her far too much to forgive her for placing her own life in jeopardy…until a violent scene made forgiveness possible.
Scene or not, she would do it, of course, in about five more minutes. But there was something she could do first that would take her mind off an uncertainty that was becoming unbearable.
The children. They were safely tucked in for the night and were probably asleep by this time. But when a household was in danger, it was best to make sure.
A moment later she was moving swiftly down the upper hallway to the children’s bedroom-playroom, with its bright picture walls and scattered toys. She thought of her husband’s recklessness in pursuing a prowler, unarmed as he was and she found herself wishing that when her son grew to be a man he would not take after his father in that respect.
As for Susan, it was very hard to tell how a child of six will feel about the value of caution and restraint when, after growing up to be beautiful, she finds herself in a parked car on a moonlit night, seated beside a man as handsome as her father but much younger. But Susan was, after all, the daughter of a very sensible woman, and as the twig is bent…
It was toward her son that her eyes darted first, when she opened the children’s door and saw that the light had not been turned off for the night. He was sitting up very straight in bed, talking to his sister with an angry edge to his voice.
“How stupid can you get?” he was saying. “You’d have to be an awful dope to believe—”
He broke off abruptly the instant he saw his mother standing just inside the doorway with a disapproving scowl on her face.
“Bobby!” Helen Wentworth said, more upset than she would have been if she had not been half out of her mind with worry. “I’m not going to tell you again that if you sit up half the night talking, you’re going to be very sorry when you ask me for a dollar to buy some stamps for your collection.”
If strain could kill she was quite sure that she would be lying on the floor in a crumpled heap instead of making a ridiculous attempt to discipline her son for something he had done a hundred times in the past. She was sure that he would sense she was not her usual self and would take full advantage of the fact.
“If Susan wasn’t so stupid,” Bobby Wentworth said. “I’d have gone right to sleep. I can’t help it if she doesn’t understand what I’m talking about.”
“What were you talking about?” Helen heard herself asking.
“Batman,” Susan said, from the twin bed on the opposite side of the room, her blonde curls bobbing up and down. She was blinking, but not from lack of sleep, and Helen remembered that she had intended to put a smaller bulb in the ceiling lamp, but had completely forgotten.
“She thinks that Batman is a real person,” Bobby said. “I told her Batman is an actor and that he goes home from the TV studio and has dinner with his family, just like Daddy. She thinks she knows everything. She’s stupid.”
“You’ve no right to call your sister stupid…or any one. Your father will be angry about that.”
“Bobby’s a scary cat!” Susan said. “If Daddy got mad he’d run and hide. Scary cat! Scary cat! When Daddy gets mad, Bobby is just a scary cat!”
“Dad always knows
what he’s talking about,” Bobby said. “Susan doesn’t.”
“I don’t want to hear another word,” Helen said. “You should know better than to quarrel about something so silly.”
It was the wrong thing to say and she knew it. Wise parents were under an obligation to give children every right to engage in discussions which might seem silly to an adult, but were important to them. But the minutes were going by fast, and she had been straining her ears to catch some sound from downstairs that would dispel her steadily mounting dread which was verging on acute alarm. Why couldn’t the kitchen door slam and a footstep sound inside the house?
Helen Wentworth stood very still, her heart skipping a beat. The thought was a double-bladed one, more alarming than otherwise. If a footstep sounded, how could she be sure that it wasn’t someone who had committed an act of brutal violence in the garden and was coming for her and the children with a gun in his hand?
Her own safety seemed scarcely to matter. But if a burglar entered the house now it would have to mean… She refused to dwell on the appalling picture her imagination had conjured up.
She forced herself to speak calmly as her hand went toward the light switch to plunge the room in total darkness.
“I’m turning off the light,” she said. “I’ll come back in a few minutes, and if you’re not asleep—”
She broke off abruptly, startled by a sound that echoed through the silent house more loudly than a footstep would have done. It was a familiar enough sound. But there are times when the loud, continuous ringing of a telephone can be as unnerving as a distant cry in the night.
“The phone’s ringing, Mommy,” Susan said. “You’d better answer it.”
“I intend to,” Helen heard herself saying, still struggling to remain calm. “But remember what I told you. You’re to stop talking and go to sleep. I don’t want to hear another sound coming from this room.”
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel Page 36
