The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  But to Blakemore there wasn’t too much difference between the music of the spheres, and a technological inventiveness so flawless and beautiful that it surpassed what Euclid had achieved in the realm of mathematics or Kepler in his exploration of the heavens with mathematics as his guide.

  For a moment Blakemore remained very still, peopling the darkness that had swept across his pupils with a host of profoundly grateful men and women intent on paying Faran the tribute that was his due.

  He had earned that homage in a hundred different ways. Every one of his inventions had provided a new kind of insurance against the all-too-human tendency to write off progress as meaningless in a society that kept repeating the errors of the past and that might soon cease to exist.

  Progress might not be too different from someone walking with pride down a long corridor toward a shining portal and getting his head blown off before he could emerge into the sunlight. But Faran had stubbornly refused to believe that just because ecological progress had come to a standstill for a dangerously long time some other way could not be found of staving off disaster.

  It was not a belief that Blakemore could do more in that respect, since all of his energies had been devoted to starting—or helping to start—ecological progress moving again. But that did not mean that Faran was not a clearheaded, scrupulously self-disciplined thinker with every right to affirm with confidence that time travel was theoretically possible.

  Whether such a claim was true or false, he had every right to make it. The only question was—had he gone too far in publicly stating that he was on the verge of surmounting every obstacle that could prevent a man from traveling from the present to an age remote from ours and returning again with evidence to prove that he had not been caught up in a wild fantasy caused by a head injury.

  To his shame Blakemore had to concede that there had been moments when he had almost found himself sharing the conviction of small minds—that Faran was mentally unbalanced. About all he could have advanced in his own defense was that the thought had made him castigate himself severely and that the general outcry had shocked and angered him.

  That was not putting it too strongly. It had been an outcry—an almost frenzied, know-nothing kind of protest. Faran was holding out false hopes, was adding to the general misery and despair. No man with so great a previous reputation should be allowed to put forward such a claim. It had to mean that he had become either a power-hungry schemer with an ax to grind, callous and cynical beyond belief—or hopelessly psychotic.

  Faran had taken what was probably the most sensible course open to him, and not, Blakemore was convinced, through lack of courage. When a sensitive and imaginative man is accused of increasing human wretchedness and uncertainty on a wide scale he is very likely to recoil from even the remote possibility of increasing it further, despite the injustice of such an accusation.

  Faran had simply dropped out of sight before the two charges—that he was insane or a cynical opportunist—could be combined and millions of unreasoning men and women had succeeded in convincing themselves that he stood condemned on both counts.

  “All right, that’s good,” Blakemore heard Faran saying. “Just stay relaxed as long as you want to. Frankly, I was amazed that you could talk at all.”

  Blakemore opened his eyes, shifted about a little to ease the pressure of the rock surface at his back—he had guessed right about it; it was a boulder—and stared across the beach to the pounding surf. The astrojet was nowhere in sight.

  “Was the jet—badly wrecked?” he asked. “I don’t see it.”

  “What do you think?” Faran asked.

  “It must have been. The controls were dead and it was fifty feet from the beach when the sun blinded me. But I heard the beginning of the crash.”

  “It went down in the water,” Faran told him. “About thirty feet out. The undertow was scooping out a big hollow in the sand, so it might just as well have come down on the beach. The jet stayed in sight and we waded out and got you out before it could go up in flames.”

  “You mean there was an explosion?”

  Faran shook his head. “No. But it happens often enough, doesn’t it? In comparison with the way it looked, Humpty Dumpty would have seemed reconstructible. It’s a wonder you weren’t—well, fragmented. But miracles do occur sometimes. I’m absolutely convinced of it.”

  “Why isn’t the wreckage still visible?” Blakemore asked, his eyes on the breakers.

  “It broke up even more, apparently, and sank deeper—right after we carried you ashore. And the tide has been rising also, just in the past twenty minutes.”

  The girl moved quickly past the sea god, fell to her knees at Faran’s side and spoke for the first time.

  “I’m so glad,” she said. “Dad’s no better than Roger at concealing the way he feels, and for a moment I was afraid you might be—” She hesitated.

  “You may as well say it,” Blakemore told her, tempted to reached out and pat her bare shoulder reassuringly. Not because it was bare, or—at that particular moment, at least—it would have given him the male thrill that even the most fulfilled of married men is never totally immune to, but simply to confirm, once again, that she was a woman of flesh-and-blood. The skin of a goddess would certainly have a different feel—would be marble-like perhaps, or suffused with a strange kind of fieriness.

  “You thought I might be dead,” he went on, knowing that if he attempted to smile he would seem to be grimacing. “I’ve often wondered how long it might take for someone who had become convinced of something like that to shake off the feeling that they were in the presence of a ghost.”

  “It was only because you looked so white,” the girl said, almost apologetically.

  He looked again at Faran. “I didn’t know you had a daughter,” he said.

  “Not everyone did,” Faran said. “A ten-year-old tucked away in a suburban cottage, doesn’t attract much public attention, as a rule. I was always very much aware of the fact, however. They say a boy can be pretty rambunctious. But a small girl can actually be more of a problem, when you’re a widower, and just a broken doll can bring on tantrums. But I guess it’s been worth it.”

  “You know damned well it’s been worth it, Dad,” the girl said, but not angrily. “Why don’t you tell him what a great help I’ve been to you.”

  “Right now there are things it’s more important for him to know,” Faran said. “A woman’s indispensability can’t be kept concealed for long.”

  He patted her shoulder as Blakemore had been tempted to do, but with a paternal simplicity that reduced to an absolute absurdity the notion that a mere mortal could be the father of a goddess.

  “This is Gilda,” he said, nodding. “Her name was not of my choosing. But my wife liked it, and I’ve grown to feel that the choice was a wise one. We could do with more Gildas today and fewer Cassandras.”

  Here we go again, Blakemore thought. Neptune and Venus and now—Cassandra. Cassandra the breast-beating prophetess of despair, wailing on the Trojan beaches because the sands were running out fast and no one had known what to do about it. Blakemore had always felt that Cassandra had not been so much unheeded as used as an excuse for inertia and the wildest kind of hedonism. Yes—Gilda was certainly a much better name for a woman. What good were predictions of disaster if everyone became helpless in the face of them?

  Or did Faran have something else in mind that had made him speak as he had? Was he still firmly convinced that there was no need for despair and that the twenty-first century Cassandras, whatever their actual names might be, were not helping at all?

  Well, at least the Venus-rising-from-the-waves absurdity had been demolished, and the other one had begun to crumble. Just the fact that Faran’s daughter had given the young man with the trident a myth-dispelling name had made the trident seem irrelevant and now Faran was completing the demolition by saying: “Despite a
ll the pinned-downed machinery that’s right at hand we didn’t have a wire-cutter. Without Roger’s help, extricating you from the wreckage would have been more of a problem. I’ve got osteoarthritis in six of my fingers. Not really bad yet, but it can be a handicap—”

  “Roger Tyson,” Gilda Faran said, nodding toward where her swim-suited companion was still standing motionless. It flashed across Blakemore’s mind that she might have felt his full name was important, because she was expecting to share it with him. It was one of those flimsily based hunches that more often than not turned out to be wholly groundless.

  Tyson seemed to possess the peculiar shyness that sometimes goes with big, husky, goal-crashing types who never seem to be completely at ease outside of athletic stadiums. He had hung back a little, as if not wanting to intrude too abruptly on Blakemore’s efforts at recovery. But now he strode forward with his hand extended.

  “It was rugged for us before you arrived, Blakemore,” he said. “Now it seems to have been your turn.”

  Tyson’s recognition of him would have surprised Blakemore more if he had not known how extensively his image had been spread around by the media. People experienced a certain chill fascination, apparently, in watching a man clinging to a small shred of hope which they could not share and wondering how he was going to feel when it was stripped from him. Just the fact that—oh, well.

  He returned the firm pressure of Tyson’s hand, thanked him for what he had done and looked accusingly at Faran, who was just starting to rise.

  “I’ve a feeling you recognized me too,” he said. “Why didn’t you say anything about the project—all the wheat I’ve grown. Frankly, nothing else is so important to me. Not even the fact that I’m still alive is one-tenth as important. Not that I’m not grateful to you, but I would have thought—”

  “Oh, the wheat,” Faran said. “Of course I knew who you were. But first things first, boy. Without you I don’t like to think what the future might be like. That wheat was still here, in the year 2207. But if you had been killed—”

  He was on his feet now, gesturing toward the sea wall. But suddenly he shook his head and his arms dropped to his side. “I didn’t mean to hurl it at you like that—so abruptly, without working up to it. I’d hate to have anyone do that to me. You’ve got to make sure a man has some firm ground to stand on, before you shatter his universe with a single blow.”

  “It won’t be a blow to him, Dad,” Gilda Faran said, quickly. “He’s been trying to build another universe too—by growing that wheat when everyone thought it couldn’t be done.”

  Blakemore was too startled by what Faran had said to decide whether or not he was less—or more—startled by what his daughter had said.

  The wheat—still growing in the year 2207! Gilda Faran had revealed that she possessed a mind that was keenly perceptive and unusual in so young a woman. To accomplish the seemingly impossible did mean to build a new universe, in a way—to bend nature’s laws to one’s will, and achieve something that was almost the equivalent of altering the basic structure of matter itself.

  But what Faran had said went beyond that in a practical way, for what his daughter had said was metaphorical—a conceit of thought that took liberties with reality.

  If Faran had seen the wheat a century from now it could only mean—

  Could a man become so startled that it could affect his hearing? He heard nothing, but Faran and Tyson had both stiffened to an instant alertness, craning their necks as if listening to some sound inaudible to him.

  It seemed to be coming from the sea wall, for they were both staring in that direction. Gilda Faran, too, was standing motionless, with her hand pressed to her throat.

  Suddenly Blakemore was no longer lying stretched out on the sand, with the boulder at his back. He was getting to his feet, so swiftly that if some force apart from his volition had lifted him up it could not have been accomplished with greater posture-changing rapidity. For an instant he was convinced that something of that nature was happening to him. Then he realized that it was something quite different. It was hearing the sound at last, hearing it clearly, and that had made it impossible for him to remain for a second longer in a reclining position.

  It was a shout of insensate rage, echoing back from the sea wall, sounding-board amplified. It could only mean that the shouter had descended to the beach and was now on the seaward side of the wall.

  A great wave of dizziness swept over him, fogging his vision. But through the haze that danced before his eyes he could see that the stretch of beach between the sea wall and the boulder was not just an expanse of gleaming sand with some cockleshells, clumps of seaweed and sun-bleached driftwood scattered across it. Something spider-like was swiftly crossing from the sea wall to where he was standing, zigzagging a little as it drew near.

  But a spider couldn’t shout and though it looked through the haze more like a spider than a man he had no doubt at all that he was about to be fired upon again by the gaunt skeleton he had pursued through the wheat from the air.

  Faran’s sharp cry of warning was followed almost instantly by a weapon blast that made Blakemore reel back as from a blow, and drop to the sand.

  Although he had ceased to feel any pain he would have thought of himself as a dead man, with his stomach blown open, if the sand had not geysered a yard from where he had been standing. It was only that spurt that made him realize that he had not been hit, and that his recoil had been caused by the feeling that he had been struck a savage blow in the groin.

  The weapon had to be close for the air misplaced by the blast to lash against him so furiously, and he braced himself for what he thought was coming—another blast so close that a second miss would be impossible.

  Either that, or his skull would be crushed by a blow from a weapon that would not be fired again—a weapon a madman might well decide to use as a bludgeon, to give freer vent to his fury.

  Blakemore’s second fear was the one that materialized. But he saw the weapon descending and gripped both skeleton wrists before it could crash down on his head.

  He twisted the man sideways and away from him, then slammed his fist against his mouth before he could wrench free. The man’s mouth opened and the instant Blakemore’s arm jerked back it was filled with a gleaming redness.

  He hit him twice more, putting as much force as he could into the blows, and he heard the rather sickening sound of a nasal cartilage splintering.

  Then hands other than his took over, and the gaunt man was no longer clasping the weapon. It dropped to the sand and was instantly snatched up by Faran, who took three quick steps backward, keeping it trained on the man’s writhing torso for an instant and then shaking his head as the two struggling figures on the sand rolled over and over.

  But his fear of bringing the weapon to bear again on a target that could easily have been the wrong one did not prevent him from stepping forward to intervene with the weapon reversed. He was just starting to do that when Tyson took care of it by bending over and prying the gaunt man’s almost skeleton-thin fingers from Blakemore’s throat, where they had gone in a last, frantic effort to reverse what the latter had accomplished by lashing out with his fists.

  Lifting the still furiously struggling man up, Tyson staggered with him to the edge of the beach and sent him crashing backwards into the surf.

  “That should cool him off!” he shouted. “But we can’t let it go at that.”

  “No, that would be a mistake,” Faran agreed. Although his voice did not quite rise to a shout it seemed to carry as far as that of the younger man. Perhaps there was something on that particular stretch of beach that magnified sound.

  Or so Blakemore thought as he dug his fists into the sand and arose to a sitting position, hating what he had been forced to do. But it stood to reason that if he had not sent his fist crashing into his assailant’s face he would not have been alive to wish that some other
way could have been found.

  At least the odds could hardly have been more even—a hunger-emaciated scarecrow of a man with a weapon, and an unarmed man weakened by shock and a close brush with death.

  But were the odds even now? What had come over Tyson? Yes, and Faran as well. What Blakemore feared was about to happen appalled him, made him want to cry out in protest. Tyson was standing at the edge of the surf, with the trident upraised and aimed directly at the thrashing skeleton’s chest.

  Its three, arrow-shaped prongs made it a far more destructive weapon than a single-bladed spear would have been. Destructive in the sense that it could tear and rend, whereas a single-bladed spear could be driven home with a single, body-piercing thrust, quickly, almost mercifully. Even that would have been terrible—unless the thrashing man was some kind of monster with the lightning at his fingertips. What kind of lightning, what kind of monster could he possibly be, Blakemore found himself wondering wildly, to justify such an assault?

  He was struggling to his feet again now, grabbing Faran by the arm and swinging him half-around.

  “Stop him, can’t you?” he pleaded, a look of horror in his eyes. “There’s nothing to be gained by killing him. It’s three against one now, and you have his weapon—”

  “Wait!” Faran said. “You’ve got an almost killing grip on my arm. Could you ease it a little, just as a favor?”

  Gilda Faran spoke then, for the first time. “He doesn’t know, Dad—he doesn’t understand. How could he?”

  “He’ll just have to be patient then,” Faran said. We could use more of that—all four of us.”

  There was no real need for Blakemore to be patient, for it happened fast. But he could scarcely believe what he saw. Tyson had raised the trident higher and there was a rippling interplay of sunlight and shadow on his straining back, as if the muscles were contracting as he made ready to plunge it into the thrashing skeleton’s chest.