The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  “All right, Dad!”

  “All of you—stay where you are,” Wilmont said. “Everything’s fine. You’ve helped more than you’ll ever know.”

  Three other men had entered the vault and they remained standing guard at the entrance until Wilmont and Wentworth passed between them with their swaying charge. His feet dragged and the look of dazed horror had not left his eyes.

  “We’ll be outside in a moment,” Wilmont said reassuringly.

  “There’s not a sound from below,” one of the men at the entrance said. “But you’d better hurry.”

  “We will,” Wilmont assured him. “See that the children follow us one at a time. Keep them from making noise.”

  Despite the urgent need for haste, both Wilmont and Wentworth were considerate and gentle with the man from their own age whose conquest of time had verged on the miraculous. They guided him forward with no more than the reassuring firmness of concerned attendants helping a patient to walk from his bed to a hospital elevator.

  In a moment they were descending the short flight of stairs that spiraled downward to the metal-walled passageway on the ground floor of the building through which the children had passed a few minutes previously. Then they were in the passageway and moving with their charge toward the open doorway at the end of it.

  There was a glimmer of sunlight just beyond the doorway which dispelled somewhat the tomblike gloom. But their expressions remained somber until they were standing in a flood of downstreaming sunlight directly in front of the massive, black stone building, facing a wide stretch of heavily forested countryside.

  There was a reassuring stillness everywhere.

  Wilmont was the first to break the silence. “It helps considerably to know we’ll have support as soon as we reach the forest. But we must not forget how dangerous over-confidence can be. We’re just at the start of a trail that may not end for us this side of eternity.”

  “You don’t have to remind me,” Wentworth said. “The children could delay us. I hope—”

  Before he could go on, Bobby emerged from the building, followed by the other children. Behind them loomed the three men who had been guarding the entrance.

  “Here I am, Dad,” Bobby said, moving quickly to his father’s side. “Does he know where he is? Does he know we’re his friends? He looks funny—”

  The man who had conquered time turned slowly and looked straight at Bobby. “Who is this little boy?” he asked. “Why did he say that? Do I know…where I am? Yes…I think I do. I am… I have awakened…”

  Wilmont tightened his grip on the trembling man’s cold arm. All of the ice had melted now, but there were a few tiny frost crystals still clinging to his beard, their sparkling brightness contrasting eerily with the dull, parchment-yellow skin that was stretched so tightly over his cheekbones that a mummy could scarcely have looked more in need of restoration. There was one difference, however. A mummy could not be restored to life. But the sun and air and human voices were dispelling for John Bramwell, slowly but surely, the mists of a sleep a thousand times longer than a mummy had ever known.

  “Yes, you have awakened,” Wentworth said quickly. “But you mustn’t try to remember too much too fast. There is nothing strange about us. We know who you are, and we are your friends, as my young son has just said.”

  “Do you really know?” John Bramwell asked, a look of desperate appeal in his eyes. “Or did you just stumble on a strange, rusting clutter of machinery and—watch what you thought was a frozen corpse open its eyes and look at you? Do you know how many years, how many centuries have passed since I closed my eyes and could hear for a moment distant voices speaking my name and then nothing at all? Or are you confused, bewildered, with no knowledge or understanding of what was done to keep me alive all this time?”

  Before either Wentworth or Wilmont could reply the look of horror that had vanished for an instant from his eyes returned and he went on quickly: “But how could I expect you to understand? I have awakened in an age that must be remote from the twentieth century—a thousand years in the future, five thousand. I do not know. The great experiment—”

  He stopped, his eyes sweeping the forested landscape that stretched out in front of him. “It is all so strange.” His voice had become a hoarse whisper and they had to strain to catch his words. “I thought I would see no trees, that every forest would have been leveled by now. And you—you speak in English and you have used no new words, no words that should have made it almost a different language by now. Even your clothes—”

  “This age is as strange to us as it seems to you,” Wentworth said. “It would be best if we told you the truth now, even though we are in great danger. The loss of a few minutes might be less to our disadvantage than your inability to trust us, as you must do if we are to save ourselves.”

  “It has been longer than you think,” Wilmont said. “A half million years perhaps.”

  A sudden anger flamed in Bramwell’s eyes. “I have been restored to life, no matter how brief the time. How can you make light of an achievement so tremendous?”

  “We are not making light of it,” Wilmont said. “I have told you the simple truth. You have not slept for just a thousand years—or ten thousand years. This age is so remote from ours that changes we would have thought impossible have taken place, and have become accepted as commonplaces in a civilization that has reached undreamed of heights. That civilization is disintegrating now, but even in its decline its achievements surpass our understanding.”

  “We have been brought here against our will,” Wentworth said. “Listen carefully, try to understand. They’ve built a machine that can travel back and forth in time. Twentieth century science enabled you to survive into this age. But the science of a half million years in the future has enabled them to conduct us on the same journey, by a different route. The two journeys have brought us together in a way they could not have foreseen. If you will think of us as your friends, we may still be able to save you—and ourselves. They worship you as a god.”

  “But surely this is madness!” Bramwell’s voice shook, and he made a futile effort to free himself. “Let go of me and do not torment me with such talk. Nothing you say makes sense. Let me find my own way out of this nightmare. Surely you owe me that much. I have risked so much—”

  “We are wasting precious time,” Wilmont said. “I’m afraid we have made a mistake. You will have to do as we say, John Bramwell. You give us no choice.”

  “You…you know who I am then?”

  “Wait,” Wentworth said, laying a restraining hand on Wilmot’s arm. “Let me talk to him. The time will not have been wasted if we can make him understand. If he struggles and refuses to believe us, we’ll have much greater obstacles to overcome. Give me just five more minutes.”

  “Each of those minutes could cost us our lives,” Wilmont said. “But you are right, of course. We need his help even more than he needs ours.”

  “I will listen,” Bramwell said. “But do not threaten me again. I do not take kindly to threats.”

  Wentworth glanced behind him and saw that the children were standing very still, having seemingly grasped the significance of what they had overheard. It surprised him that they could have remained quiet for so long. Then he saw that the two men who stood in the doorway were holding the two six-year-olds by the hand, and looking sternly at the Trilling twins. Bobby’s silence did not surprise him, and the Thacker boy seemed almost Bobby’s equal in his ability to exercise restraint.

  Reassured, he began talking to Bramwell, quietly and earnestly, and Bramwell heard him out in silence.

  For a moment, when he had finished, it was impossible to tell how much Bramwell believed of what he had said. But he was not kept long in doubt.

  Bramwell drew himself up and said, very firmly, “You can stop treating me as if I were a very ill man, barely able to stand. I had difficulty in wa
lking at first, but now my strength has returned. I have to believe you. Otherwise I think I would go completely mad. A half million years. It could just as easily be a million years, since, as you say, you’ve no sure way of checking on it. Time travel! How utterly inconceivable that seemed, even to science fiction writers who made so much of it. We thought it would be ten times as difficult to achieve as breaking the genetic code. It seemed inconceivable, in fact, that the past and the future could exist as three-dimensional realities anywhere in space or time, despite the fact that the physicists refused to rule it out as a remote possibility in a relativistic universe. We thought that only the present could be real in a totally physical sense. How mistaken can you be?”

  “We’ll be making a greater mistake if we doubt it now,” Wilmont said, “Or lose another minute. We have only two weapons. One of them is you. The other is the guidance we have received from one of the Krulls, who is risking his own life to help us, as you’ve just been told. But both of those weapons may be frail reeds—against the destructive forces they could unleash if the thought-barrier we’ve erected against them breaks down. Their inability to infiltrate the minds of the children may be of no further use to us. The children enabled us to do what we could not have done ourselves, for no adult could have turned the dial that controlled the freezing mechanism. But now—”

  “As soon as we’re in the forest we’ll all be together again and the Krull will go right on guiding us,” Wilmont said, his voice harsh with impatience. “We’d better get started. The worst mistake we could make would be to belabor the possibilities of disaster.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  They were all together again, the children no longer as carefree as they had seemed when age upon age had gone rushing past in the long journey through time. They were not playing games now, as they had done in the steel-walled compartment which had concealed from their view the wonders which only Wilmont and Joyce Drake had gazed upon. They looked serious and alert, as if they had become aware, as children can, that when adults have a great responsibility to bear, fun-making must be ruled out.

  In the forest gloom only the Krull seemed able to move about as if he were performing some simple daily task that did not alarm him in the least.

  What strange creatures they were, Joyce found herself thinking, as she moved at Wilmot’s side at the end of the long procession of men, women and children who were winding their way with extreme caution between the tall pines and century-old oaks. How could the Krulls, she wondered, remain so completely above the battle which everyone else, since the very beginning of man’s life on earth, had been compelled to wage just to stay alive?

  They were sensitive and imaginative, they appeared to feel deeply, and yet the thought of death and destruction seemed not to trouble them at all. They held very lightly joys which they could hardly have failed to value highly, for every aspect of human experience delighted them.

  Might it not be possible that in the Krulls human nature had been transformed into something truly splendid? To enjoy life to the full as an individual but to complain not at all when it became necessary to pass the torch to other hands—was not that the hallmark of a kind of greatness?

  They appeared to be both self-centered and completely selfless, and there was something about them so paradoxical, a combination of human attributes that filled Joyce with awe.

  Perhaps only in a civilization that was dying, a culture pattern that was on the wane, could such an embodiment of the human spirit at its best and most courageous free itself from the shackles of the past, and truly soar.

  To her amazement, Wilmot’s thoughts had apparently almost paralleled her own, for he turned to her suddenly with a look of grim satisfaction in his eyes. “Trusting Kaljac completely was the wisest thing we could have done,” he said. “In some strange way, the Krulls have thrust aside all fear and possess an inner strength that they seem determined to keep a closely guarded secret. I’ve a feeling Kaljac doesn’t want us to know just how strong the Krulls are. In an emergency, I believe they could overcome a threat to their survival without experiencing an instant of uncertainty or self-doubt.”

  “I think I know what you mean,” Joyce said, nodding. “Bramwell has conquered death as no other man has ever succeeded in doing, but now he has become vulnerable again. No matter how courageous he may be, he does not want to die. But the Krulls are without fear. They have managed somehow to erase the sharp line which we draw between living and dying. They think of human existence as a kind of—well, a kind of flowing. If you live you live and if you die you die, and the flowing never stops.”

  The vegetation was beginning to thin out a little. The huge oaks stood further apart, their branches seldom interlocking and there were glimmers of sunlight between the masses of swaying foliage.

  Wentworth and his wife were at the head of the procession and Kaljac had been walking at their side, his grotesque body slightly hunched. He had turned back only once and had fallen a short distance behind to make sure that the other men and women and the surprisingly quiet children had not gotten out of line. But now he abruptly stopped walking and stared back toward the very end of the line, curious to see if Wilmont and Joyce had been encountering any difficulty in keeping up with the others.

  Just why he should have been particularly concerned about them wasn’t revealed until he was at their side, a look of uncertainty in his deep-set, gray eyes.

  “It is very strange,” he said. “I am unsure that we are not being followed. Perhaps in your minds the barrier is weakening a little and I became obscurely aware of it. You must remember that, as I’ve told you, we must be prepared for a sudden breakthrough. It could occur at any moment. Have you heard any unusual sounds behind you? They will try to move as silently as possible. But a crackling of the underbrush, a faint sound, would be enough to convince me that the uneasiness I experienced a moment ago should be taken seriously.”

  “We heard nothing,” Wilmont said. “If they attack us, how can we hope to defend ourselves without weapons? Won’t we be completely at their mercy again?”

  “You have a living weapon—Bramwell,” the Krull said. “I’ve told you that before.”

  “And I told Bramwell that,” Wilmont said. “But I had difficulty in making myself believe it.”

  “You must guard against doubting it,” the Krull said. “You must not permit yourself to forget, for an instant, that I am here also. If I were not here even Bramwell might not be able to save you. But there are many things about the Krulls that you know nothing about. We are an affectionate and brotherly people. I like all of you, I have allowed myself to be very foolish and now there is nothing that can be done about it. You may pity me a little, if you wish. I think I should like that.”

  “Anyone with so shining a gift for friendship is in no need of pity,” Joyce said. “In our age we should have looked upon you as far above us in every respect. The love for one’s fellows you speak of was not unknown to us, but we were reserved and suspicious. Why have you singled us out? I mean—there is nothing special about us.”

  “You do not understand,” the Krull said. “You are human and so am I. You are in trouble and I am not—or was not until now. If I did not share your torment by taking a part of it upon myself, I would no longer be able to go on thinking of myself as human. And when you share such a burden with someone you find yourself warming to them.”

  Before Wilmont could say anything in reply, the Krull turned and went hurrying back to the head of the advancing column. Bramwell swung about and stopped walking for an instant as the small, grotesque figure darted past him, shaking his head in evident concern.

  “Apparently when Bramwell saw a Krull for the first time it gave him as much of a shock as his awakening did,” Wilmont said. “What Kaljac just told us was very strange.”

  “Why?” Joyce asked, the tension under which she was laboring making her voice rise almost angrily. “
I don’t see anything strange about it. Perhaps emotions which are rudimentary in all of us have become highly developed in Krulls.”

  “But it’s as if there was something in his nature which makes him feel like a condemned man. He doesn’t have to help us. I mean—he’s under no actual compulsion to do so. It just isn’t human to feel that you have to expose yourself to the deadliest kind of danger for total strangers from another age. Instant friendship. You drop it into a cup of boiling water and it dissolves in a few seconds, and you’ve got a strong brew that you may not want to drink at all. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “It does to me,” Joyce said, her anger very real now. “Of course the Krulls are different from us—tremendously different. What do we really know about human motivation? No two people ever think or feel exactly alike. And in a half million years human nature could hardly have remained unchanged. The Krulls have changed so much physically that it’s hard for us to think of them as completely human. Why shouldn’t they have changed emotionally as well? They may actually be more human than we are—if by ‘human’ you mean all of the attributes which set us apart from the lower animals.”

  “You may be right about the changes,” Wilmont conceded. “There is no scientific evidence that supports the contention that human nature cannot change, that it remains basically the same no matter how greatly human beings may differ in a superficial way. I’ve always believed that human nature is as plastic as the physical changes which take place throughout the whole of nature and lead to the evolutionary development of new species of plants and animals.

  “A new and different kind of man would naturally not share all of our so-called human motivations. The kind of instant friendship—you can call it empathy if you wish—which Kaljac has just displayed could be, as you say, the result of a half million years of evolutionary development. It may have become so deeply grooved into his nature that he cannot fight against it, even though surrendering to it would threaten his own survival.”