The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  For an instant the Telen leader seemed unaware that he was about to pay with his life for a mistake that had driven the others to despair and enraged them beyond endurance. It was only when the filament widened and became a raging column of flame that his shoulders jerked convulsively and an agonized scream was torn from his lips by the searing heat that was burning the flesh from his bones.

  Bramwell’s thrashing body had disintegrated invisibly, concealed by the swollen flames. But the Telen’s body remained for a longer time obscurely discernible in the midst of the glow. It shriveled and darkened and turned skeletal, the flames licking at the hollow eye sockets of what was no longer a human face, but a deaths head turning slowly about. Then a blinding brightness turned the flames into a stationary blob of radiance, filling the forest aisle with a dazzling glare again and making every tree and shrub seem to glow with its own light. The dark tangle of underbrush from which the Telens had emerged looked as if it were tipped with fire.

  The glare vanished as abruptly as if a giant hand had closed about it, and reduced it to a few flickering glimmers of flame. Then it was entirely gone, and another smouldering pile of fallen leaves concealed the incinerated Telen’s ashes and what may have been a few blackened fragments of bone.

  One by one the Telens dropped their weapons, as if they were reminders of the madness that had led to a double act of violence and destroyed forever what they had thought indestructible—the torch of eternal life held high by a godlike figure from another age.

  It was not from the haphazard discoveries of man that their belief in Bramwell had grown, but from the myths and legends that only a mad mind deluded with thoughts of a vanished greatness could have originated and sustained. Now the glory was gone, the bedrock of their belief forever splintered into inglorious fragments.

  One by one their weapons crashed to the forest floor and they fled from the sight of them, and from the men and women who had almost succeeded in taking Bramwell from them. They plunged into the underbrush, their tall bodies seemed as grotesquely bent as broken reeds at the edge of some dismal, time-forsaken lake.

  For a moment there was only the sound of the underbrush breaking under their feet and then their despairing wails began again and sustained until they dwindled to far-off echoes of sound.

  Wilmont could hear all around him again the voices of the forest, the scurrying of small animals from thicket to thicket in the sunless gloom, the hum of numberless insects, the sudden fluttering and wild cry of a nesting bird, alarmed for the safety of its young. But most of all he was aware of his own harsh breathing and the tumultuous beating of his heart.

  His gaze was on the two mounds of smoking leaves. Joyce was tugging at his arm, but he could not throw off the feeling that he was completely alone, caught up in some wild distortion of reality that had carried him across oceans and continents to a world where impossible hurricanes raged and the sky was a sheet of flame.

  Then the face of that strange, wholly terrifying world changed and he was in a much smaller world that seemed for a moment like a gigantic goldfish bowl and he was looking out at Joyce’s white face pressed to the glass.

  At last the forest came sweeping back and he saw everyone moving about like puppets on a lighted stage, pointing and staring with their limbs attached to strings.

  Finally the strings turned into downstreaming rays of sunlight and the men, women and children came back into focus and he heard Joyce pleading, close to his ear.

  “We must follow Krajan now. We must do exactly as he says. Darling, try to remember that Bramwell has been spared all further torment. Try…you must. He is gone, yes. But he could not have lived much longer. In this age, cancer is unknown, and the cure that was undoubtedly discovered has been forgotten.

  Wilmont nodded and was about to reply when he saw the Krull coming toward him. The children had come out from behind the trees and the men and women he had thought of as puppets were moving about more purposefully now, despite their paleness and the look of horror in their eyes.

  The Krull seemed completely composed and moved with miraculous ease, casting only the briefest of glances at the two smouldering mounds of leaves as he skirted them on his way to Wilmot’s side.

  “The time machine is completely unguarded,” he said, as he stood close to Wilmont, his breathing distinctly audible. “They have never made the slightest attempt to surround the machines with guards or protective devices of any kind. Why should they take such precautions when the Krulls, to the best of their knowledge, have never displayed the slightest interest in time-travel? How little they know…or suspect. I am depending on you to help me keep the children from delaying us. They could so easily do so…”

  “We will see that they do not get out of control,” Joyce promised, with a tremulous smile.

  “It should not be difficult.”

  “Well…”

  “She has had considerable experience with children,” Wilmont said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  They were traveling back through time. It seemed incredible and yet it was happening—it was happening to all of the men, women and children who had been removed from the middle years of the twentieth century and imprisoned in a metal-walled compartment from which only Wilmont and Joyce had escaped—to look out through a wide, shining window at the future sweeping past.

  And now that future was reversing itself, the years were falling away and beyond the wide pane the past was coming into view again.

  They were alone again in the great observation compartment, with only the Krull at their side.

  And the Krull was talking, talking, and everything that he said made a glorious kind of sense.

  “Time has three faces,” the Krull was saying. “The hoary face of the past, the always dangerous, uncertain face of the present and the face of a future that may be either the most beautiful face in the world, or dark, cruel, and ugly.”

  Suddenly the Krull’s arm swept out, seeming almost to embrace the window, as if it held a secret and an importance for him which only a Krull could understand.

  “The navigational instruments have been set,” he said, “to return you safely to your age. But I shall not accompany you. In a short while now, I shall be getting off.”

  Before Joyce or Wilmont could reply he continued quickly, his eyes crinkling a little, as if the stunned look that they both trained on him had not been unexpected and it amused him to find his expectations confirmed.

  “You see, there was an age when the Krulls exercised a tremendous influence when they were respected for their learning, their wit and their imaginative sensitivity. That influence was powerful enough to have prevented the Telens from gaining an ascendancy such as you have seen. But it was not used wisely—we neglected too many golden opportunities. That is why I am returning to that age to lay the groundwork for—I guess you would call it a new start. I have been selected for that task and it is one that I shall take pride in undertaking.”

  Wilmot’s reply was further delayed by the sudden arrival of Wentworth, his wife and two children by the window.

  “Krajan is getting off!” Bobby Wentworth said. “Has he told you yet? He told me this morning.”

  “No,” Joyce said, her eyes crinkling. “Your children are the real heroes and have every right to be told first. Isn’t that so, Krajan.”

  “Well…” The Krull looked embarrassed. “I just thought…”

  “That children are good at keeping secrets,” Wilmont said, nodding. “We understand, and there is no need for you to apologize. All success, my friend, in the great tasks ahead.”

  “We’ll all drink to that,” Wentworth said.

  SURVIVAL WORLD

  Originally published in 1972.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “The call should come any minute now,” Dan Blakemore told the unsmiling blonde woman at his side. “Mason warned me on the disk last n
ight that my reprieve would be revoked before noon.”

  He looked away for a moment, experiencing a trace of that rending sensation which most people feel when they are required to break abruptly with a treasured moment in Time.

  “But we’ve had our days in the sun—total freedom from strain,” he added, pressing her hand. “Haven’t we, darling?”

  “I guess you could say that, Dan,” his wife replied. “But I sometimes think we’re the only two people in the world who know exactly what that kind of freedom can mean.”

  It had been Blakemore’s first vacation in four years and he could not shake off the feeling that it might well be his last.

  By digging deeply into his memory he could recall an earlier one that had been a shade more physically invigorating, but only because his extreme youth at the time had enabled him to engage, for ten or twelve hours at a stretch, in strenuous outdoor games and dangerous sports. They had embraced the scaling of precipitous cliff walls, surfboard riding and skin-diving in the Bahamas, long walks over rugged terrain, and a go at archery and dart-hurling that could be hazardous if you relaxed your vigilance, and your competitor stayed alert.

  At thirty-four he could still have passed for a university undergraduate and he was just as capable of resisting physical fatigue as the youngster he had once been. But when once the edge has worn off adventurous risk-taking for its own sake, inhibitions can be generated that are difficult to overcome.

  All of that had to be equated, of course, with the fact that he was no longer in the Bahamas, and that most of the youths who had shared his belief that the spearing of sharks and barracudas was the most challenging of underwater sports had long ago given up and gone home.

  It had to be equated, also, with what could happen if the surfboard you were riding overturned where the levels of offshore contamination had not been determined in advance. You might merely choke and gasp for awhile, with an acrid taste in your mouth. But you were far more likely to be plunged into an undertow so corrosive you’d have to shop around for a skin graft.

  Otherwise nothing had changed very much across the years. The youngster he had been and his present self had both been engaged in ecological research on a Government grant and had found themselves thinking of ecology, at times, as having much in common with an abandoned puppy, barking furiously at their heels and making intolerable demands.

  It was only when Blakemore, moved by a concern despite himself, picked the puppy up and walked on with it that it turned into a porcupine in his arms—a monstrous beast with lacerating quills and razor-sharp claws. It was almost as bad as having a tiger by the tail.

  “When you’ve achieved a major breakthrough,” he heard himself saying, “the feeling that total victory may be within your grasp can make putting your head on the chopping block again easier to endure.”

  Helen Blakemore’s reply was slow in coming, giving him an opportunity to stare around him once more and luxuriate in the great beauty of his surroundings.

  How supremely beautiful everything seemed, how remote from the decay and dissolution that was so prevalent elsewhere! The salt water aquarium which stood on a pedestal in the middle of the sun room was as enchanting as the view through the wide picture window before which he was reclining in a soft-cushioned lounge chair.

  Beyond the pane there was a stretch of open countryside that bore a distinct resemblance to the sea, for there were many acres of golden grain ruffled by the wind, and in the far distance a lighthouse. The oceanic sweep of the vista extended for miles, beneath an almost cloudless summer sky.

  But even more oceanic, in minuscule, was the aquarium, for it seemed to bring the sea right into the sun room, despite the fact that it was small enough to be encircled by Blakemore’s spread arms in much the same kind of loving embrace he had bestowed on his wife a few minutes earlier.

  In the circular glass bowl, amidst waving fronds and a miniature coral reef, fishes of fantastic shape and coloration, disported precisely as they would have done in the sea itself—great “Mother of Mysteries,” and, of course, of mankind.

  Blakemore felt a little guilty whenever he quoted Swinburne, if only in his thoughts, because he liked to think of himself as a man with no hangups dating to the Victorian Age. But great poets were, after all, ageless and it was surely his privilege to recall the immortal lines, from Spenser to Auden to Robert Graves.

  Not forgetting Shelley, of course, who had had some marvelous things to say about the blue Mediterranean, the only sea that had remained two-thirds uncontaminated and that Blakemore could still visualize as it had once been while traveling in an astrojet high above it.

  Why was that? He found himself wondering for the thousandth time. Had the ancient gods protected it in some inscrutable way? It seemed unlikely, for it had been on that very sea that the despairing cry, “Great Pan is dead!” had first come to the ears of the ancient world.

  Helen Blakemore spoke then, seemingly in reply to what he had said a full minute previously. “There should be no need for Mason and the others to tighten the thumbscrews, as you’ve accused them of doing. I’m quoting your exact words. Haven’t they enough discernment to realize that a man who has devoted the best years of his life to patient research carries his own built-in taskmaster around with him?”

  She paused an instant, then went on angrily, “What kind of image do they have of you? And of themselves? Are they just well-meaning but badly frightened men or hooded executioners who would have been perfectly at home in the Tower of London seven or eight or ten centuries ago? I’ve never been very good at dates. It’s hard to say, anyway, just when they first started lopping off the heads of people on a systematic scale, for failing to accomplish the impossible.”

  Her voice became even angrier. “Tightening the thumbscrews! Putting your head on the chopping block! If such medieval notions keep occurring to you I may have to start worrying about what could happen to the widow of a condemned man. They razed his land, didn’t they? And put his wife and children on the auction block?”

  If, at that particular moment, anyone else had been sitting at Blakemore’s side he would have refused to tear his gaze from the picture window. But now he turned and looked directly at another vision of enchantment that most men would have surrendered the best years of their lives to without feeling that they were making the slightest sacrifice.

  Surely time and change, he told himself, could never really mar the inner splendor—yes, and the outer splendor as well—of so beautiful a woman, for it existed quite apart from aging.

  “You’re judging them too harshly,” Blakemore said. “They’re weighed down with responsibilities that they can’t shoulder without help. They’re simply counting on me to keep them from staggering too much when everyone is watching them. You know what it could mean otherwise. It would take very little now to start a panic.”

  Helen Blakemore fell silent for an instant. Then she said, “How long have we got, Dan? Fifteen years? Twenty? It all seems so hopeless.”

  She gestured toward the picture window, as if the wind that was blowing across the wheat field, bending the stalks erratically to right and left, had stirred in her just as great a swaying. Hope and fear, hope and fear—back and forth precariously.

  “Those acres of golden grain are your personal triumph, Dan,” she said. “But it was the costliest ecological project ever undertaken. It would take a century and the pooled resources of every nation on earth to duplicate it on a wide scale. Even on a limited scale, right here in the United States, it would take too long. And who is to say to one demoralized community, ‘You will get enough food to insure your survival’ and to another, ‘You will get no food and must perish.’ It would lead to chaos—and open warfare.”

  Before Blakemore could say anything in reply a sharp crack echoed from wall to wall of the sun room, and a small, black hole appeared in the center of the picture window, causing it to splin
ter along its entire length.

  The aquarium was blown apart. As the shattered glass tinkled to the floor the water gushed forth in a descending torrent, carrying the fishes and clotted masses of bright green algae with it.

  In a moment the fishes were flapping about on the floor, separated by violence from the uncontaminated microcosm that had simulated a coral reef in some far-off, bright Azore.

  There was another sharp crackling sound and Blakemore heard his wife cry out in frantic warning “Dan, get away from the window. Oh, my God—”

  Blakemore remained for the barest instant frozen to immobility, his eyes on the shattered aquarium, as if whatever was turning the sun room into an exploding nightmare had drawn to a focus there, in the worse of all possible disasters.

  Then he stiffened in sudden horror, realizing that the aquarium was of far less consequence than what was happening elsewhere. His wife was on her feet now, clutching at his arm and endeavoring to drag him to one side.

  He leapt up instantly, grabbed hold of her, and dropped to his knees, pulling her down with him until they were well below the sill.

  Staring up, he could see that there was nothing left of the windowpane but a few jagged splinters of glass projecting from a frame that had a smoke-blackened look. It was hard to see beyond the sill from so oblique an angle. But there seemed to be a faint flurry of movement—a land of animated blue—at the edge of his vision. Just a wind-stirred stalk of wheat, perhaps. It was impossible to be sure.

  “Stay down!” he warned, tightening his grip on his wife’s shoulder. “Did you catch a glimpse of him?”

  “No,” she breathed. “Just a stirring in the wheat.”