The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  “He’d already told us what the trident-shaped one could do to the mind—how you had to prod a man a little to make him walk when the paralysis sets in. We never thought we’d have to use it on him. To Roger it had become for the moment just a grown man’s toy—a shining gee-gaw.

  “Malador had told us it could render an animal just as helpless, so that even if you were not bent on hunting down a man—” Faran shook his head, his features tightening a little. “A century from now the penalty for killing an animal is death. But the penalty for killing a man is much less severe. Sometimes no one bothered to ask what had become of a missing relative or friend.”

  “Please, Dad!” Gilda said. “We didn’t actually see anyone being hunted down. Everything we saw was bad enough. If we keep remembering everything we heard—”

  Faran nodded, “You’re right, of course. It’s a mistake to let it weigh too heavily on our minds. I could remember a dozen other things as bad as cannibalism, but I don’t intend to. If a man is driven to such extremity that he has to cut off and eat his own—”

  “No, Dad—please.”

  “I just wanted Blakemore to know how rare a thing it was for a man in an age like that to go to sleep at night with a reasonably clear conscience. Think it over, boy. If they committed an ugly crime against your memory and your wheat it shouldn’t disturb you too much. It was inevitable, under the circumstances.”

  Faran paused again. But this time his gaze did not travel to the sea. He looked down instead at his own sun-bronzed legs—remarkable in their sturdiness for a man of sixty-three—and Blakemore was half-convinced that he was wondering how he would feel if he were compelled to part with one of them to keep himself alive.

  Not that such a heroic measure would have been possible or, as far as Blakemore knew, had ever been attempted by a man in his right mind. A toe or finger, yes. He had heard of that.

  “It was the first time that Malador had had an opportunity to really look around him, and take in the entire beach, the sea wall and as much of the wheat as we can see from here,” Faran said. “All I can be sure of is that he stopped showing us how to operate the weapon and swept the beach with his eyes, looking toward the breakwater at first and then up at the sea wall.

  “All at once he began to tremble, and gripped the weapon more tightly. He narrowed his eyes and a dark flush crept up over his cheekbones. He had the look of a man convulsed with rage. But whether he had recognized the wheat from the drawings he’d seen of it or was just enraged because it was guarded by a high wall—well, your guess is as good as mine.

  “I only know that he swung around and made for the sea wall on the run, still holding fast to the weapon. He was on the other side of it before Roger was half-way across the beach.

  “There were several things Roger could have done. If he had been less startled, he could have trained the trident-shaped weapon on him before he reached the wall. Failing that, he could have pursued him through the wheat. He might even have managed to race after him a little faster before he reached the wall. But you’ve got to remember we had no idea what had come over the man.

  “Not right at the moment, I mean. Later we put two and two—or six multiplied by eighteen—together and decided we could make a pretty good guess as to what had motivated him. But by then he was far gone in the wheat.

  “We figured there were several things he might do. He was a stranger in a strange age. Strange, that is, to him. What seemed most likely was that his brainstorm would wear off, he’d be gripped by panic, and return to the beach. What we feared most was that he might continue on through the wheat and find the grower of the wheat and—”

  “He did, “Blakemore said. “If you’d gone in pursuit of him I would have been spared a lot of anguish, both mental and physical. Though I suppose you can’t say that anguish can be physical.”

  “You mean he attacked you with that weapon once before? Good God—”

  “Twice before,” Blakemore said. “The first time he blasted at me through the window of the summer residence where I’ve been vacationing. The second time he trained it on the astrojet from the wheat when I went in pursuit of him. That’s why I crashed—”

  “We were just about to go after him when the astrojet came sweeping down over the sea wall,” Faran said. “It took us a long time to decide what it might be best to do. We banked too much, I’m afraid, on his returning. We thought we’d better wait and see.”

  “That doesn’t make too much sense to me,” Blakemore said.

  “I’d be happier if you’d refrain from accusing me until I’ve told you why we waited,” Faran said. “Armed with that weapon and acting the way he had, I wouldn’t have wanted him to return to the beach with just Gilda here to pacify him. What if he had trained the weapon on her? And that’s a big field of wheat you’ve grown. A two-man searching party could get lost in it for hours. Of course only Roger could have gone. But he was stubborn about leaving me and Gilda here alone.

  “I’m better at inventing weapons than using them in self-defense, and only he had really mastered that trident—or thought he had. And he thinks my osteoarthritis has slowed me up a little physically, which is nonsense, perhaps. But still—”

  “But eventually you would have gone after him? You just said—”

  “All three of us,” Faran said. “But the thought of Gilda stumbling through the wheat, accidentally separated from us perhaps, and with Malador on the loose— At first I refused to take that risk, and it took Gilda at least twenty minutes more to convince me I was underestimating her ability to stay alert. Then we saw your astrojet—” A thin smile hovered for an instant on Faran’s lips. “At least an hour must have passed while we were debating what to do. When you’re under that kind of strain you’ll do crazy things at times. The sun’s still almost directly overhead, as you can see. But it was even hotter an hour and a half ago, and Gilda and Roger went for a swim, leaving me perched here like a boiled New England lobster.

  “I needed cooling off more than they did, because I was angrier at Gilda than I’d ever thought I could be. She had the idea that a frail girl of eighteen could go striding through that wheat with all of Roger’s capacity for endurance. Yes, and his ability to defend himself.”

  “Not physical strength, Dad—confidence,” Gilda said. “It’s a big asset in a woman.”

  Blakemore wasn’t looking toward the sea wall when he heard a high-pitched woman’s voice raised in what he thought for an instant could only be a scream.

  He turned abruptly and stared, shading his eyes against the glare. Faran and his daughter swung about just as quickly.

  It hadn’t been a scream, but a shout. He realized that when he saw that his wife was descending the sea wall without ceasing to wave at him, and so swiftly that he feared that she might at any moment lose her balance and fail.

  He would have shouted to her to be careful, not to take such a risk, that there was no need for her to rejoin him in a matter of seconds when they had been separated by an astrojet crash, a painful awakening, an attack by a man from the future and his subjugation by a blinding sheet of flame—he would have shouted all that to her and more, if only inwardly, if she had not reached the beach before he could do so, and was now running toward him across the sand.

  In another moment she was in his arms, straining against him, her hands entangled in his hair.

  “When you didn’t come back there was only one thing I could do,” she breathed. “There was nothing to stop me from coming straight through the wheat on foot, and you must have known I would.”

  “I didn’t know,” he said, stroking her hair. “I’ve got to be honest about it. I thought you’d wait until I got back, because, after all, I haven’t been gone so long.”

  “No? You’ve no idea how long it’s been, apparently, or you wouldn’t be talking that way. Where’s the astrojet? Did you overtake him? Who are these people?�
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  “The astrojet broke up and has been carried away by the tide,” he said. “In fragments—or so I’ve been told.” She pushed his head back away from her and looked steadily into his eyes, her own eyes more startled than he had ever known them to be.

  “Dan, why do you always talk like that when something terrible, something you’d rather not have me know about, happens to you? If you were forced to bring the jet down and it crashed—why must you pretend it had an amusing side? You could have been carried away in fragments too!”

  “All right, I might well have been. No crash could have been more shattering—to the jet at least. He tried to kill me again, from the wheat. He shattered most of my instruments and I came down in a long glide that carried me over the sea wall and into the sea, where the water was barely ankle-deep. Only some miracle kept the jet from bursting into flames. But they got me out.”

  “Who did, Dan?”

  “I did, but not without assistance,” Faran said. “It was the assistance that counted most. I’m Philip Faran. Blakemore didn’t know I had a daughter, but I’ve always known he had a wife. The media took care of that, but I must say—”

  Faran permitted a glint of amusement to show in his eyes. “It would be just a waste of time—and we haven’t got too much of that—to damn the media for not doing full justice to your image on the disk. Too great a dazzlement can arouse the envy of—well, men less fortunate than Blakemore, and they may not have wanted to do that.”

  Helen Blakemore was staring as steadily now at Faran as she had stared at her husband. But now there was more than just startlement turning to relief and gratefulness in her eyes. Her expression puzzled Blakemore for a moment, until he remembered where he had seen that look before. He had seen it in old photographs of the men who had first set foot on the moon, after they had returned to Earth, removed their space gear and settled down to be interviewed, with their thoughts still two hundred thousand miles away, on lunar craters gilded by the sunlight and dead sea bottoms that were not really seas, but seemed just as cavern-mysterious.

  It was Faran who told her everything he felt she should know, gesturing occasionally down the beach toward the breakwater as he talked. And when he had finished it didn’t surprise Blakemore that it was only a moment before they were all moving along the beach in the direction of the breakwater, for Helen, as he should have known, was not going to be satisfied until she had seen the time-traveling machine for herself.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Time can pass very quickly just in the natural course of events, human or otherwise, as Blakemore knew very well. But it had seldom been brought quite so forcefully home to him as it had during the hour it had taken Faran to conduct them on a guided tour of the machine.

  They had seemed to move from compartment to compartment—from the staggeringly incredible to the just-short-of-miraculous—in a matter of minutes, ten or fifteen at most.

  Blakemore also knew that there were moments in a man’s life so filled with startling revelations that the mind encapsulated them in a kind of shining cocoon, which remained apart from all other memories from the cradle to the grave.

  They were standing now in a metal-walled compartment flooded with pale blue light, staring up at what Faran had called the viewing window. It was about twenty feet long and ten feet in width, and through it the breakwater and a narrow stretch of shining beach were distinctly visible.

  “Once the tangential scanners have activated the warp field and the machine is in motion,” Faran said, “you’ll see at times just a continuous flickering. But images will appear as well. They will dissolve very quickly, however, and if you don’t stay alert you could miss an entire age, perhaps three hundred years.”

  There were several questions that were troubling Blakemore, for he was quite sure that there must be great, onrushing waves on the River of Time that would have to be broken up or held back before you could emerge in just one particular age, one decided upon-in-advance region on the shoreline.

  But before he could ask them Faran said: “I’ll have to leave you for a moment. I’ve got to talk over with Roger the problem we’ll be having with Malador and I don’t think I should postpone it any longer. Considering the strain you’ve been under I imagine you’ll welcome a few moments of uninterrupted silence.”

  He smiled, nodding toward the viewing window. “If you’d prefer a slight diversion instead—it needn’t interfere with the silence—you might try thinking of the window as a crystal ball. Who knows? You might get a clairvoyant glimpse of the future without traveling in time at all.”

  Since the window had actually looked out upon the future the suggestion had a curious relevancy, even though Blakemore was sure that Faran had spoken jokingly and that his smile would have broadened if he’d thought for a moment that his words had been taken seriously.

  They certainly hadn’t, Blakemore told himself, as far as he was concerned. But when Faran had nodded, and left them alone, passing through a gliding panel that instantly closed behind him, Blakemore was less sure about how seriously his wife had taken the remark.

  “Why don’t we try it, Dan,” she said. “An ordinary crystal ball wouldn’t interest me at all, unless I was just killing time and there was one right at hand. But think, Dan—that window has actually traveled into the future. What if it brought back with it some undeveloped astral images of the future that we could develop by concentrating on it?”

  “Astral! That’s the first time I ever heard you use that silly word. Paranormal, you mean. ‘Astral’ goes with fake medium rubbish and having your fortune read in tea leaves.”

  “Well, paranormal then. Why not, Dan? It’s not going to hurt us to try.”

  “Because you know how I feel about crystal-ball gazing. I thought you felt the same way.”

  “But you don’t really have to believe it. Not in a serious way. You’ve always been interested in Charles Fort, and those strange books he wrote close to a century ago. About how—well, what we think are stars may be just pinpoints of light shining through holes somebody cut in the sky. You told me once that you couldn’t imagine anything more nonsensical. But still, I could see that the notion fascinated you. I bet if you’d had an opportunity to test it out—”

  “All right, you win,” Blakemore said. “But just until Faran comes back.”

  Aside from the strain that it put on his eyes, staring steadily at the viewing window cost nothing, as Helen had pointed out, and for a full minute Blakemore did not lower his eyes, as he might have done if he hadn’t feared that she might transfer her gaze to his face and accuse him of cheating.

  Suddenly she cried out, and her fingers fastened on his wrist. They tightened, causing him pain, but the changes that were taking place where the breakwater encroached on the narrow stretch of beach were happening so swiftly that for an instant he could only stare.

  The beach was both receding and dissolving, the sands running down toward the sea but melting away before they quite reached the surf line. The surf line itself was dissolving, along with the breakwater.

  Everything beyond the window seemed suddenly to whip away and dissolve into emptiness, to be replaced by a flickering that was no different from the one Faran had told them about.

  Or at least, it did not appear to be different, for it was occurring at intervals between a number of swiftly appearing and dissolving images.

  There were barren gray wastes and tempest-tossed seas. There were crumbling buildings as well, and great stationary machines starkly silhouetted against the swollen red disk of a setting sun, or a rising one that was shedding a brighter radiance across the land.

  There were black wharves and many ships and occasionally stretches of open countryside, with almost all of the vegetation looking as if it had been swept by fire or destroyed by frost or leveled by a hurricane.

  And then, slowly, the land became green again, with an abundance o
f vegetation everywhere, including orchards of fruit-bearing trees.

  When the flickering returned for perhaps the twentieth time and Helen’s nails were biting so painfully into his flesh that he was forced to twist his wrist about without actually wrenching it away from her he heard Faran saying,

  “The dials have been reset! We don’t know how it could have happened, since Roger didn’t do it. And no one else could have gotten to them, except— It certainly wasn’t me and it couldn’t have been Gilda.”

  Blakemore turned, too shaken to quite grasp what Faran had been trying to tell him.

  Faran was standing just inside the panel, his pallor so extreme that if he had returned looking the same way a few minutes earlier, when nothing had taken place that could have alarmed him, Blakemore would still have had the feeling that he was in danger of collapsing.

  “The machine’s completely out of control,” Faran went on, with an unsteadiness in the way he was holding himself that made what Blakemore feared seem even more likely. “We’re already beyond the age we visited—three or four centuries beyond, at least. And there’s nothing to stop the machine from careening through Time for a half million years. Do you realize what that means, Dan? A half million years!”

  Faran might have gone on and told Blakemore more if the viewing window hadn’t filled with a sight that even he could not ignore, close to collapse as he appeared to be.

  It was a white and resplendent city, and it seemed almost to tower to the stars. It was the most beautiful city that Blakemore had ever seen.

  In a moment it was gone.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  What it really came down to was a drawing of lots to see who would be the first to go outside.