The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  Was the venom still winning? Had she come into the compartment to be with him when—

  “Do you know how long you’ve slept?” she asked, which answered nothing, except that it did not seem exactly the kind of question a dying man would be likely to display the slightest interest in. Just the fact that she had asked it almost had to mean that his ability to sleep had seemed so encouraging a sign to her that she could hardly wait to tell him about it.

  “No, I don’t,” he said. “I guess you’d better—”

  “Just lean back now. Don’t try to sit up too quickly,” she cautioned, the instant he started to raise himself. “You’ve slept for almost a day and a half. Philip and I have been in and out at least fifty times, taking your temperature, feeling your pulse, watching the fever go down. You stopped tossing back and forth hours ago. Everything’s fine now. At least, it should be. You haven’t any temperature and you certainly recognized me quickly enough. Oh, I was scared for a minute. But the way you’re talking now—”

  “I haven’t said much,” Blakemore reminded her. “But I’m not disoriented, if that’s what you mean. Mind’s clear enough. But I haven’t tried moving around yet. I don’t know how weak I am.”

  “You may not be weak at all,” she said. “But you’d better wait a few minutes before you try to move around. No setting up exercises, darling. Don’t try to prove too much. It doesn’t seem to have been a very poisonous snake.”

  “It was a deadly killer snake,” Blakemore said, shaking his head. “All adders are. I was lucky, that’s all. Every venomous snake bite doesn’t inject into you the same amount of poison. There are lots and lots of recoveries, as Philip stressed. There were some lancinating pains in my arms and legs before I blacked out.”

  “Yes, I know. You kept groaning in your sleep for a long while. Poor darling—”

  “I’m going to get up,” Blakemore said, abruptly.

  “No, don’t. It would be a crazy thing to do—”

  “I’ve got to find out. No sense in putting it off. If I get dizzy I can flop right back on the cot.”

  Before she could protest further Blakemore sat up and lowered his feet to the floor. In a moment he was not only on his feet but walking back and forth in front of the cot with his shoulders held straight.

  “It’s incredible,” he said. “I’m perfectly all right. Not a twinge. I’ve never felt better.”

  “That’s because you’ve lead such a clean life. No smoking or drinking. It always helps.”

  “If I had to forego tobacco I’d let that snake bite me again.” Blakemore said. “Liquor too, whenever a little of the watered-down stuff comes my way. If you mean, it’s no longer possible for me or anyone else to be a heavy drinker—”

  “You could smoke right now, if it would help,” Helen said.

  “It would,” Blakemore confirmed. “Unfortunately, Roger borrowed my tobacco pouch. When there’s something you’d really be grateful for it always seems to vanish.”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed it too. Whenever you say something like that I get a shock of recognition.”

  Suddenly all of the forced levity went out of Helen Blakemore’s eyes. She grabbed hold of him, pressing her face hard against his chest, clinging to him with both arms. He could feel a wetness trickling down between his chest hairs. “If anything had happened to you—” She was mumbling the words and they sent a kind of vibration through his ribcage. “Dan, it would have happened to me too. Not in just the same way, but it would have happened. If any part of me stayed around for awhile, to walk about and talk to people, it would be just a shell.”

  “I don’t think so, darling,” Blakemore heard himself replying as he stroked her hair. “Look, if everyone went on mourning the dead the world would turn into a big, big funeral parlor. I’d want you to marry again and be happy.”

  “You don’t really mean that.”

  “Well, I—”

  “All right, it’s what most people would expect you to say—even to think and feel. But you and I, Dan—we don’t have to think in clichés. We don’t have to at all, because what we have is very rare.”

  Suddenly she straightened and removed her head from his chest. He hadn’t been mistaken about the trickling. Her eyes were so wet they looked like tiny lakes vertically suspended on opposite sides of her nose. The insane fear came upon him that all of the water might suddenly drain out of them, and he was quick to prevent that by flicking away the wetness, very gently, with his thumb. Instinctively she shut her eyes, enabling him to admire, for the ten-thousandth time, the veined delicacy of the lids.

  She managed to smile. “Dan, if it would help you to smoke it will take me only a minute to get you that tobacco. You could get it yourself, but I’d like to be the one to tell Roger the good news. Philip too, of course.”

  “Well, all right,” he said. “But don’t be gone long and please come back alone. Not that their concern doesn’t mean a lot to me. I probably owe my life to Philip’s presence of mind. I was damned shaky, and if he hadn’t applied the tourniquet fast—”

  He looked down and stamped his bitten foot. “Circulation there seems to be okay now,” he said. “When did Philip take the tourniquet off? Within forty-five minutes or so, I should imagine. I’ve heard it’s a little risky to leave one on for more than half an hour.

  “We both came back to see how you were after about twenty minutes,” Helen said. “Philip felt it would take you that long at least to fall asleep, and that if you needed us you’d use the communicator, as he told you to do. You were asleep, but tossing about and groaning when we looked in on you. Philip loosened the knot a little and pulled out the wooden splinter he’d used to tighten it with. About an hour after that he removed the tourniquet completely.”

  “A risk in that too,” Blakemore said. “But I guess he figured if gangrene set in I’d have no chance at all, and he had to balance one risk against another.”

  “Please don’t,” Helen said. “I’d rather not think about it. It’s over and done with. I’ll get you the tobacco.”

  Just before she passed out through the entrance panel directly opposite the cot he said again: “Come right back—alone. I just want to sit here quietly for about fifteen more minutes with my arm around you.”

  “I don’t like tobacco smoke when it’s swirling all around me, as I’ve told you again and again,” she said. “But this time—it will be heavenly.”

  He sat down on the cot as soon as the panel glided shut, not because he’d been mistaken about how completely recovered he was, but simply because, after a moment of great uncertainty and strain, it was more natural to sit than to stand. Besides, he had nothing important to do until she got back and it was easier to just sit there with his hands on his knees and his eyes trained on the panel, waiting for it to glide open again.

  The trouble was, it didn’t open for so long a time that he got restless and stood up again. What could be keeping her? Both Faran and Roger were certain to be waiting impatiently for her to return with either good news or bad and could hardly have been far from the compartment. It surprised him a little that Faran had not been at Helen’s side, that he had awakened to see only her face bending over him. But that could be put down to her conviction that he would soon open his eyes and her determination to be alone with him when it happened.

  But surely Faran, Gilda and Roger were just outside, probably at the end of the passageway. Why then was it taking her so long to secure his tobacco pouch from Roger?

  The minutes seemed to be lengthening out, to be turning into hours. Possibly not more than five minutes had passed, but how could he be sure of that? He was losing all track of the time. Besides, five minutes were three minutes too many. He was sorry now he’d said anything about the tobacco. It wasn’t all that important.

  He suddenly realized he was making too much out of it. There was nothing to stop him from going in se
arch of her. He owed that to Faran anyway, even if Helen had already told him. “See, here I am, as well as ever. Helen and I will not soon forget what you did for us. Now she and I are going to relax for a while. We’ll put a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the panel and I’ll pack some of that stringy, stale tobacco into my pipe that Roger doesn’t seem to appreciate and light up. Come next Thursday, we’ll all go outside and have a picnic in the cornbrake. No, the big, exotic, year 500,057-type flower garden. There are no stinging vines out there, or cannibal plants or anything like that, as far as I’ve been able to determine. Adders? Oh, a few, of course—Mamba-green and very beautiful, at least in coloration. But we won’t let them scare us, will we? If one of them should bite us a tourniquet and a little extra attention to the wound will fix us up fine and dandy. We’ll be new men and women—”

  It was a new man who crossed to the panel, activated the opening mechanism and waited for it to glide open—a man quite different from the one Blakemore had felt himself to be when his anxiety had been getting out of hand a few seconds earlier. What he’d needed most of all, he now realized, was a strong incentive to stride about confidently outside of just one narrow compartment. It was the best and quickest way of making absolutely sure that all of his strength had come back.

  The instant he emerged into the passageway all of his anxiety threatened to return. It wasn’t so much that the passageway was deserted. Faran and the others could easily be waiting a little farther away. It was the stillness. Not a whisper of sound anywhere, nothing that remotely resembled a far-off murmur of voices.

  It was the kind of stillness that could make you feel that you were standing in a vacuum, with no medium that could carry sound waves to your ears even if they had been present immediately outside the vacuum. It was even worse than that. It was as if the entire machine had become a vacuum, had turned into the exact opposite of an echoing chamber, with all sound sucked away into emptiness.

  Always before there had been sounds of one sort or another. Even walls of solid metal made sounds continuously, very tiny stress signals that you couldn’t actually hear but that you somehow remained unconsciously aware of. The inaudible creaking of the inanimate. You were most aware of it in the control compartment, with its intricate tiers of machinery. No one could stand close to a big, silent computer, even when it wasn’t cerebrating and remain unaware of it. It didn’t have to be clicking out punched tapes. Just its sheer mechanical weariness after that kind of toil could make it give off fatigue signals. Machines, particularly complex ones, never stopped complaining and the metal walls of a machine that had traveled thousands of years into the future should have had more to complain about than the most weary of giant computers.

  There was one thing, Blakemore knew, that he must do immediately. Such thoughts were wild indeed, and although he could not deny that there was some truth in them, he must stop blowing it up in that way. There was just a kind of unnatural stillness around him, period. He had experienced the same feeling before, many times, and even though it had seldom been quite as pronounced as now it could still turn out to have been a delusion.

  Another thing he must do was refuse to take seriously, even for the space of a skipped heartbeat, the even more alarming thought that something had happened to Helen and the others and he was alone in the machine. That, too, could have created a stillness, for the absence of a living presence that you’ve taken for granted, that you’ve visualized as still close at hand, could make you feel more totally cut off from the stir of life than a long period of solitude to which you’d become accustomed. The harder to believe, the more incredible such an unexpected stillness seemed, the more acute your awareness of it became.

  Just the fact that he could have been standing straighter, that he was letting it get to him to such an extent that he was losing confidence in the complete return of his strength, made him square his shoulders and advance in quick strides to the end of the passageway.

  He passed around the first turn and was half-way down the equally deserted passageway that branched off from it when he ran into Roger.

  The passageway had been deserted when he’d made the turn, because at that moment Roger had no more than started to come in view around the sharp-angled wall where the passageway branched for the second time.

  Roger had covered the intervening distance in a forward lurch that was half a stagger and half a leap, so quickly that he smashed into Blakemore before the latter could hurl himself to one side.

  He would have gone right on past if Blakemore hadn’t recovered his balance, and flung his arms around him, not in a warm comradely embrace, but with the embattled anger of a man who refuses to be almost knocked off his feet by anyone, friend or foe, without demanding and getting an explanation.

  Roger’s face had the half-insane, wildly twitching look of a man goaded beyond endurance by something that he has seen or heard or endured as a result of atrocious physical violence.

  But somehow, just the fact that it was Blakemore who was holding fast to him and not an extension of some unimaginable horror pursuing him along the corridor enabled him to conquer—or hold in abeyance-enough of his fright to make what came from his lips intelligible.

  “Malador got away! I’m going after him. Dan, don’t try to stop me. If you do, I’ll have to make you let go of me. I’m bigger, stronger than you are—”

  “Now look—” Blakemore flared. “If you think—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, can’t you realize that’s not a boast or anything? I just happen to be built that way. You know I can do it. And I’ll have to—if you make me.” There was a strange look in Tyson’s eyes. Blakemore had seen that look before. It was that of a man who felt guilty right down to his soles, shaken to the depths by something he’d done or said. But Blakemore had the feeling that it had nothing to do with what Roger had just said and his curiosity overcame his anger.

  “All right,” he said. “If you want to get yourself killed I can’t stop you. Just tell me one thing—and I’ll step aside and let you do that. Where is Helen? Is she all right? If she’d been harmed I’ll go with you—even if a midget doesn’t pack much of a punch.”

  “Dan, I told you I didn’t mean it that way. Helen’s all right. So is Gilda.”

  “And Faran?”

  “He’s paralyzed. But it will wear off. He tried to stop Malador by struggling with him, and that skeleton ape trained the—the trident on him. Helen and Gilda are with him. I’m sure he’ll come out of it. Malador’s still grateful to him, I think—wouldn’t want to kill him. It’s you he wants to kill.”

  “I see. The gut-level hatred is still there. He had the best chance he’ll ever get. Why didn’t he take it?”

  “He thought he had—yesterday. He thought you were dying—or dead. You can’t exact vengeance on the dead. Good God, that’s what Faran’s always saying. Well—it’s true.”

  It suddenly seemed to Blakemore that he might be losing his mind. He tightened his grip on Tyson’s shoulders, shook him. “You’ve got to help me get this straight. Then I’ll let you go. How could he have tried to loll me? The snake tried and almost succeeded. But what had Malador to do with—”

  “Everything,” Tyson said. “He made you step on that snake, with his mind. He knew it was there. He’s—well, clairvoyant. He has hypnotic powers as well—extrasensory hypnotic powers.”

  “I can’t believe that. Malador—”

  “Dan, listen to me,” Tyson pleaded. “He made me let him out of the compartment. He didn’t have to use the trident, he just told me to let him out and I did. And he came walking right out with the trident. Possibly he couldn’t have done that earlier. All I can be sure of is that he tried and succeeded once before in forcing me to—to obey him. The word sticks in my mouth but I might as well say it. I went into the instrument compartment and made changes on three of the dials. That’s why the machine went careening through Time. That’s why we�
��re here.”

  “He forced you to— You mean, you were under an hypnotic spell?”

  Tyson nodded. “I was in a trance—both times. The first time it was so deep I came out of it without knowing what I had done. This time I knew exactly what I was doing, what was going on around me. But I still had to obey him. Maybe he was working up to that, bending all his efforts toward making me let him out. I couldn’t lift a hand to help Philip when he was struggling with him. But I could see, I knew. The hypnosis must have been stronger in one way, lighter in another. That could happen—”

  “But how could you have known what you did when you were in the first trance?”

  “I put two and two together. I can’t be absolutely sure, of course. But doesn’t it seem logical it must have happened that way? Changes were made in the dials. And no living hand beside my own could have made them. I was alone in the instrument compartment when you arrived with Faran, and your wife - Gilda was in her own compartment at the opposite end of the machine.”

  Tyson’s voice changed, became more urgently pleading, almost stricken in its appeal. “Let go of me, Dan. Don’t force me to lash out at you. I’d win, you know, and that’s still not a boast. I’ve got to go after him and bring him back.”

  “In God’s name, why?” Blakemore demanded. “If he can make me step on a poisonous snake and force you to obey a hypnotic command, bringing him back could be suicidal. He has the trident-shaped weapon to fall back on if he can’t repeat what he did to you. What chance would you have? Unarmed as you are—”

  Tyson shook his head. “I’m not quite that much of a fool. He didn’t take the other weapon—the death-dealing one—with him. Philip has made access to it very difficult, and he forgot to make me bring it to him. I’m on my way to get it now.”

  “He didn’t forget. I’m sure of that. If what you say about him is true he has too many other strings to his bow to be concerned about your going in pursuit of him. I can’t imagine just why he wanted to escape, if he thought I was dead and he could have killed you and Helen. I can understand his wanting to spare Faran and his daughter out of gratitude, but otherwise—”