The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  After seven hours, six minutes and an uncounted number of seconds the machine had presented them with that problem by ceasing to continue on through Time. It had emerged tangential to the warp field that Faran had tried and failed to make comprehensible to Blakemore in an age so remote in Time that there was no possibility of determining the exact length of the journey by a careful examination of the dial tapes. Faran had put it at between four hundred thousand and a half million years, but had conceded that it might be closer to seven hundred thousand years. He had insisted on allowing for a reasonable margin of error, but Blakemore had found it a little difficult to believe that a difference of three or four hundred thousand years could be thought of as reasonable.

  He saw no point in arguing with Faran about that now, however, for a problem of a more immediately critical nature was confronting them.

  Outside the viewing window there was a luxuriance of vegetation that wasn’t just tropical. There was something monstrous about the plant life that the view revealed, something that seemed to pass beyond the limits imposed by nature on the size, coloration and structural complexity—but particularly the size—of flowering plants.

  And someone had to be the first, to descend into that unknown morass. It wasn’t nearly as important as to who should be the second or third, for it would be the first who might be the least likely to return.

  It was Tyson who had suggested drawing lots but it was Blakemore who now found himself insisting that it did not have to be with straws.

  “Lot drawing depends entirely on chance,” he pointed out, ignoring the skeptical look in Tyson’s eyes. “And it is circumstances that determine how chance will operate. Or, if you prefer, how the dice will fall.

  “Now—there are plants out there. And I’m an ecologist. That circumstance is the exact equivalent of an unlucky straw. I’ve drawn the unlucky straw.”

  It was a claim that was hotly contested by both Faran and Tyson. But the logic of it was unassailable, and in the end he got his way.

  A few minutes later he was standing at the summit of the machine, on the topmost rung of the narrow metal ladder that descended forty feet to the ground.

  Blakemore looked down before he started to descend and for a moment the thought that when he reached the base of the machine he might find no solid ground to stand on made him hesitate.

  Was it so wild a conjecture? For several years before the first moon landing a similar fear had exercised a profound influence on the planners of the Apollo mission. It had been thought that the lunar surface might prove to be a fragile superstructure, of powdery pumice perhaps, and that if a man stepped out upon it he would break through that thin crust and plunge, perhaps several hundred feet, to his death. Just the fact that a lunar module, despite its much greater weight, had landed without breaking through would not have ruled such a possibility out, for its wide-based equalization of weight distribution would have enabled it to float as lightly on the thin outer crust as a raft on the surface of the sea.

  What Blakemore saw when he stared down was quite unlike the pumice superstructure which the Apollo astronauts had failed to find and had not seriously expected to find after the lunar probes had sent back to earth data that had revealed exactly how firm and rock-strewn the moon’s surface was—at least over wide areas.

  What Blakemore saw when he stared down was different in a bewildering and—yes, frightening way. He had never seen vegetation quite so profuse and variegated. But though it was quite unlike the mineral superstructures the moon probes and human explorations had failed to find, it was certainly a sea—not a watery one, but a living sea of vegetation with great tidal whorls and swirling cross-currents in it—blue, green, vermilion, purple and black.

  It was the black whorls that filled him with the most alarm. No, call it just acute concern verging on alarm. But under the circumstances that was bad enough. Upon such a sea a raft of light construction might have stayed afloat but hardly a man—if what he feared turned out to be true.

  What if the seemingly almost unbroken surface of that sea was a delusion and a snare? Not of man’s making, of course. But nature could create traps and pitfalls just as dangerously deceptive. Between the gigantic blooms of many colors—some of them were so bright he could not stare down at them without shading his eyes—and the swaying palm leaves, five or six feet across, there were—those dark areas.

  They seemed filmed over with a kind of weaving opacity that changed color as it stared at it, becoming faintly bluish and then jet black again. But might it not be the opacity of total emptiness? Did not an absence of substance sometimes produce exactly that land of illusion?

  What if the first step he took amidst the blossoms and swaying fronds became his last? What if he went crashing through a flowery superstructure to land amidst a tangle of roots far below, killed instantly by the height of the fall?

  Blakemore suddenly found himself thinking of it in a different way. Not as a sea of vegetation, but simply as the roof of a tropical rain forest with a towering cliff wall to the right of it where the machine had emerged from another kind of sea—the vast ocean of Time. It was poised on the brink of the precipice and the instant he descended and took a few steps forward he would go toppling over the edge and fall to the forest floor and be just as instantly killed.

  But that the machine should have emerged at precisely that point, in so unusual and precarious a position, would have been too coincidental for sane belief, and his refusal to take it seriously for more than a few seconds helped him to think of the first possibility as almost equally wide of the mark.

  When a traveling vehicle came to a stop after a long journey, whether in Time or in space, an emerging passenger was more likely than otherwise to find no immediate danger confronting him, for Earth’s hazardous pitfalls were widely dispersed.

  Deciding that the law of averages was in his favor, Blakemore descended all the way without letting himself think again of what might happen if he had placed too much trust in a law that many thoughtful men had questioned and with considerable justification.

  The moment he reached the base of the machine and took two cautious steps forward all of his fear returned. And this time it was not just acute concern that had brought it back, but overwhelming, instantly experienced alarm.

  He began to sink down. His feet sank into something soggy and the gigantic blooms closed it around him with a swishing sound, half-smothering him as they lashed against his face and threw him almost completely off balance.

  He sank lower, throwing out both of his arms in a frantic effort to remain upright amidst the lashing. He came close to toppling forward in a head-long sprawl and might have done so if the vegetation had been less tightly wrapped around him, exerting a backward tug and his legs had not descended into the sogginess from his ankles to his knees.

  The awful thought that he might have stepped into a quicksand bog made him suddenly attempt to do deliberately what he had almost done by accident, hurl himself forward and stretch out at full length on the ground to keep his weight more evenly distributed. But that had become difficult with the sogginess already tightening octopus-like about his knees and the instant he tried to bend forward at the knees and bring the rest of his body level with the ground, the backward tug of the vegetation increased twofold, forcing him to remain as vertical and rigid as a corpse being carried into ocean depths by a swiftly revolving maelstrom.

  Then, so abruptly that it seemed for an instant like the total evaporation of a deadly peril in a nightmare that awakening has shattered, he was spared all need to struggle. The sogginess underfoot was replaced by a firmness and he ceased to sink down.

  So firm did the ground under the sogginess become that he was able to stand on it without swaying and lift first his right foot and then the left from the sand or mud, or whatever it was the gigantic plants had needed to enable them to achieve a luxuriance that could have been matched
in any age less remote in Time—not even by the great rain forests of the Amazon.

  Blakemore was quite sure of that. Not in any recent age could such growths have made a mockery of man’s puny attempts to enrich a soil that had not yet suffered despoilment—or after it had been despoiled and abandoned to the desperate, uncertain and even more fumbling efforts of ecologists to overcome a criminal interference with nature’s capacity for renewal.

  For almost a full minute Blakemore remained motionless, staring incredulously about him. Some of the blooms were intricately veined and possessed a marvelous translucency. There was one that resembled a wafer-thin circle of lighter-than-air tissue—or tissue, certainly, as light as thistledown—sliced from the center of an enormous orange. It swayed gently back and forth in the breeze, on a stalk that glowed like an amethyst, and was just as clear purple-violet in hue. Another was three-tiered, with a projecting terrace on each level that blazed with contrasting colors and if a swarm of bees had descended on it, Blakemore was sure they would have looked like tiny dancers swirling about to the tunes of a Viennese waltz.

  There was a heart-shaped flower that looked not unlike the heart of a giant, torn bloodlessly from his chest and suspended high in the air on a stalk so thin that it seemed to be floating back and forth above the palms without visible support. There were two other heart-shaped blooms, not hueless like the truly enormous one, which was unique of its kind, and looking more as if they had been detached from a pack of cards used by the same giant. The smallest, looked as it might well have come from the Queen of Hearts herself, for it was encircled by three golden crowns and what could have passed for a jewel-encrusted diadem.

  The palms—many of them seemed also to be floating—were just as huge as the blooms and there were two that had a diameter of at least thirty feet. Some of them were as bristling and formidable-looking as the spiny cactus growths that had survived the blight in unirrigated desert areas during all the years of Blakemore’s boyhood and had done pretty well after that. Others were as smooth as glass.

  Slowly and carefully, while another minute passed, Blakemore untangled the fronds that had whipped themselves about his waist, and were still threatening to throw him off-balance as the wind tore at them. It was not a strong wind for the most part. But it came in gusts, and all of the vegetation swayed when the gusts swept over it with what occasionally seemed almost hurricane force.

  Surprisingly enough the feet that he had lifted from the sogginess no longer sank down into it again, and he suddenly realized that he had taken a few steps forward without being consciously aware of having done so. He was now standing on ground that still seemed a little soggy but that he could move over without becoming mired.

  Cautiously, as soon as he had freed himself, he advanced a few steps more. The ground was firm enough to support him, and although he had the feeling that he was sloshing through mud or some very clinging kind of wet clay he experienced no difficulty in raising his feet and setting them down again farther on.

  Apparently his first step had taken him into an unusually soggy expanse, probably one of the black whorls he had noticed before starting to descend and should have taken care to avoid by keeping its exact location in mind.

  But it would not do, he told himself, to retrace his steps and shout up from the base of the machine that it was perfectly safe for the others to descend. That had to be established with absolute certainty, even though Faran and Tyson would probably start down the instant they saw he was still on his feet and was continuing on without difficulty.

  For them the risk would not be too great and there was no way he could keep them from descending, unless he shouted up that he was in deadly danger and was coming right back. Since that would not have been true he saw no reason for deceiving them. In their case a warning to be careful and to test in advance every step they took would be sufficient.

  But he had no intention of letting his wife descend until he had walked back and forth between the blooms for a considerable distance and in more than one direction. Not only was she more impulsive than the overwhelming majority of women, she had the foolish idea that he was over-solicitous in regard to her safety and on that account could be unduly cautious, restraining her quite unnecessarily.

  There could be no question about his solicitude. But why, he found himself wondering for perhaps the thousandth time since their marriage, did some women have to be like that? What was wrong with solicitude? Why did Helen actually resent the fact that the man she had married loved her so much that he was tormented night and day by the thought that she might do something dangerously reckless?

  He happened to know, just from discussions he’d had with three or four of his non-bachelor friends, that there were women who valued solicitude more than any other quality in a man. Why couldn’t it have been that way with Helen? Weren’t women supposed to want to be loved in that way? How often did it happen? Weren’t they always complaining about how infrequently it happened? “Love is a woman’s whole life—to a man a thing apart.” But when a woman like Helen got the kind of break women were always dreaming about, she scorned it.

  Someday, Blakemore told himself—if he lived to be a hundred and six—he might get to understand women. But he seriously doubted it.

  He had advanced about thirty steps more and was just about to turn around and look back at the machine to see if Faran and Tyson were descending when he felt a sharp stab of excruciating pain in his right heel. It vanished so swiftly that he thought for an instant that he had stepped on a nettle or been stung by a hornet, except that it felt more like a white-hot wire grazing his foot and whipping away again.

  His sandals were not only covered by crisscrossing straps in the region of his heel, with less than a quarter-inch of bare flesh exposed and vulnerable, but the mud or clay that was making his feet still feel sodden must have made that quarter-inch harder to get at. Yet, incredibly, something had pierced his flesh to the quick in precisely that spot, and now he was walking on again, too stunned for an instant to accept it as believable.

  Then, abruptly, he was forced to accept it, for something cold and swift-moving slithered past his ankles with a faint, hissing sound.

  Just as unbelievable as the assault on his heel was the thought that flashed through his mind as he lowered his eyes, for it was an attempt to rationalize away a probability that struck a chill to his heart, and he had never before thought that he could complete a rationalization in two or three seconds.

  But complete it he did, lowering his eyes slowly to give himself just a little more time. There were hornets that built nests out of mud, and if a passing heel trampled on the entrance of such a nest—well.

  It was a useless rationalization, as he should have known the instant the hissing had come to his ears. He had been bitten by a snake, and it was still in sight when his eyes came to rest on the tangle of above-ground roots, each twice as thick as its emerald-green body, between which it had started to crawl.

  He bent quickly, grabbed it by the tail, and dragged it forth. In a moment he was stamping on its head, breathing harshly, bringing his bitten heel down upon it until it was flattened to a pulp.

  It had been flat to begin with, because it was unquestionably the head of a snake with an adder-like aspect. A Green Mamba? No—Mambas were of the cobra family. It was certainly just as green but clearly not a mamba. A little less deadly perhaps, but most, if not quite all, snakes with triangular, flattened heads were venomous.

  Familiar as he was with snakes—what ecologist wasn’t—some of the rarer Old World ones he wasn’t sure he could have identified from a single specimen, since the sub-species color-range varied.

  Perhaps Faran or Tyson would know. Oh, God, was he starting to become irrational? If he didn’t know how could he hope that they would? Still, the snake might be of some help. There were snakes that mimicked adders. And he might be able to determine how much poison it had carried.
If it had just previously bitten some small animal its poison sacs might have been depleted. Smashing its head had been a stupid thing to do. It would make that harder to determine.

  He should have gripped the back of its head just below its mouth as he’d once seen a herpetologist do with a Fer-de-lance, and carried it intact, and despite its thrashings, back to the machine.

  But he picked it up anyway, and flung it over his arm, still quivering and with its head so crushed that it no longer looked triangular.

  He had almost covered the distance he had traveled over ground that had turned out to be as dangerous as he had feared it might be, but in a different way, when he saw Faran waving and staring down at him from near the summit of the machine. He had just started to descend and there was a puzzled, slightly angry look on his face, distinguishable even from a distance of forty feet.

  “What kept you so long?” he called down. “We couldn’t see you at all for a minute or two. This is the wrong time for ecological research.”

  “I’ve been bitten by a snake,” Blakemore shouted back. “A venomous one, I think. I’m carrying it. Didn’t you notice?”

  “Yes, I see it now. For God’s sake, boy, get up here as quickly as you can. We’ve got to do some fast cutting.” It took Blakemore close to half a minute to ascend to where Faran was standing, for he had to transfer the snake from his right to his left arm, and once it almost caught on one of the ladder rungs.

  He was a little out of breath when he reached Faran’s side and the older man was breathing harshly too, but not from exertion, and his face was drained of all color.

  “Get inside,” he urged. “Hurry. We’ve got to make some deep incisions and apply a tourniquet. Poisonous snakes are far rarer than harmless ones. What makes you think it’s venomous?”

  It was true, of course—wildly, fantastically so. They were far rarer, which meant that anyone who trusted the law of averages was backing a horse of the wrong color. To encounter a venomous snake a few minutes after you emerged in a world remote from ours was as unlikely as that the machine could have come out on the brink of a precipice. Of the two possibilities it was probably the unlikeliest. But that meant nothing at all, since it was the one that had happened.