“One in Antarctica, I suppose. I’m glad I won’t be there to hear the speeches.”
“One more thing. I won’t say we don’t want you to return. We do—we want it very much, but only if you can be 100 per cent positive of hitting an unpopulated area.”
“I understand that.”
“Unless—” Stubbins chuckled dryly. “Unless you can manage a bull’s-eye on the Kremlin.”
“How about the Pentagon?” Karvel asked.
Stubbins sputtered something about a happy landing, and Haskins’s voice came in crisply. “We’re ready. How about you?”
“Ready.”
“There’s probably a lot I should say, Major, but I won’t even try. We all wish you Godspeed and a safe landing, and Captain Morris has just asked me to tell you he is praying that the direction will be up. Up the mountains, I suppose.”
“Tell him,” Karvel said, “that I hope to leave the whole dratted range in his custody.”
“Will do. Ready for countdown. Ten, nine, eight…” Karvel counted with him. At zero he felt a slight jerk. He continued counting. “One, two, three—” Then he broke off. The only voice he heard was his own.
PART TWO
Chapter 1
Silence.
Then, almost imperceptibly, pressure.
Twisting in alarm, Karvel moved his hands across his chest and touched his face. There was nothing to brush away, nothing tangible to fight.
The pressure continued—light, insistent, all-embracing.
As he weighed his chances for survival, a remark echoed hauntingly in his mind. Gerald Haskins’s remark: “Time? Well, you can have a shot at designing a protective device that would keep out time!”
Now he understood the fallacy that had undermined all of their planning. It was not a question of keeping out time, but of breaching time, of breaking a path through it.
He was moving through time, and time resisted his passage.
And there was pressure—feathery, intangible, but nonetheless, relentless.
He lay quietly, and suppressed an urge to escape from the cylinder, to find out what was happening outside. The limping, time-compressed minutes slipped away, and slowly, tediously, the pressure increased. Karvel began to wonder about the meaning of time when one was passing through time. Was his wristwatch actually marking off seconds and minutes and hours? He lay in the tightening grip of time and pondered its measurement. When finally he decided to perform an experiment, he found the luminous hands of his watch immobilized under a pressure-warped crystal.
Pressure—and then pain. Karvel’s calm resolution faded. He began to struggle, and each movement, each tightening muscle encountered stubbornly unyielding force. In a surge of panic he heaved himself against the cylinder’s lid. The tremendous pressure without had sealed it rigidly. Karvel sank back, muttered, “When I called it a coffin I thought I was joking.”
Still the pressure increased, until it was a swollen, vicious thing that held him in a vise of torment. The slightest movement required a prodigious effort, and he underwent a prolonged and exhausting struggle to bring his hands to his face in an attempt to alleviate the intense pressure on his eyelids.
Each breath became a grim toil to move the overwhelming weight that crushed down upon his chest. He gulped oxygen in shallow gasps, and became dizzily aware that he was suffering a protracted, tortuous suffocation. The convulsive pounding of his pulse wracked his entire body. He may have lost consciousness; afterward he had no recollection of what had happened, or what he experienced, in those final seconds when the pressure moved relentlessly across the excruciating threshold of unendurability.
He remembered only the delightful sensation of release, and his first triumphant, unburdened, life-giving inhalations.
He asked nothing more than to lie there endlessly on the wonderful softness of the foam padding. He had to force himself to move his hands, to raise the lid. The cylinder opened easily. He climbed out, and kicked open a supply cylinder. He glanced through the hatch, and then tossed out his emergency equipment and quickly followed it, leaving the multilingual ultimatums spilling about the U.O.’s interior.
As his feet touched the ground he heard distant crashes and a muffled upwelling of screams of pain and terror. He stood in a broad expanse of park. A small stream tinkled musically almost at his feet, its path as geometrically precise as that of the tree-lined avenue that bordered it. In the opposite direction a city loomed, an enormous complex of which he could see neither beginning nor end. It was shimmering white in color, with angular tiers piled up like precisely arranged boxes, and with a multitude of truncated, slightly conical towers rising above it. The towers looked like misshapen chimneys, and the whole had the appearance of an ultramodern factory.
And Force X was smashing through it.
Walls sagged, swayed, collapsed as their supports were ripped away. Towers teetered crazily and toppled, and flailing bodies momentarily fell or leaped clear of the wreckage. The relentless, widening lashes struck again and again, and each successive blow wrenched simultaneous cries of anguish and fear from additional terrified thousands. The ground level exits and the breaches in the outer walls were quickly jammed with frenzied humanity, which swelled toward Karvel like a mindless tide of ants rushing from a threatened anthill.
Karvel stood watching it, paralyzed with helpless horror.
The mob should have lost its momentum as it fought free of the collapsing city and spilled into the spacious park. It did not. Karvel realized abruptly that its leaders were no longer running away from the city—they were running toward him. Singly and in small groups they detached themselves with bursts of speed and altered course to converge on him.
So heartsick was he at the catastrophe he had precipitated that for a long moment he stood his ground, waiting resignedly to welcome whatever vengeance they chose to wreak on him.
Then he remembered that this same fury might next strike New York, or London, or Moscow, and that nothing would then prevent the military from returning the U.O. with an atomic warhead. He had a mission to perform, and he could settle with his conscience later.
He gathered up his equipment, splashed through the stream, and fled.
But he did not run. He moved with an easy, swinging limp, glancing back frequently. The park was filling with a widening ooze of incoherently screaming humanity. Karvel’s immediate pursuers were now far out in front. They had covered more than a mile, first in headlong flight and then in furious pursuit, and they could not maintain that pace indefinitely.
He lengthened his stride and struck off through the stubble of a harvested grainfield that stretched in flat monotony to the horizon. Another backward glance showed him that his pursuers were still running at top speed. The sunlight gleamed on their bald heads, and their odd-looking, brightly colored garments billowed and flapped in the breeze.
Several strange aircraft had lifted above the city, effectively sealing the hopelessness of Karvel’s flight. In defiance of all logic he began to run in earnest.
His cane was useless on the soft ground, and he tired quickly. He stopped, turned slowly, faced his pursuers. He made no motion to unsling his rifle or draw his pistol. He did not know if the weapons had been damaged by pressure, but in any case he could not bring himself to inflict further harm on these people. The screams he had heard rang hauntingly in his conscience, and in the background the cruelly lacerated city loomed like a monstrous accusation.
He waited. His pursuers ran faster, ran with the churning speed of sprinters taking off on a short dash until, only a few yards from him, they came to a stumbling, indecisive halt. One of the strange aircraft floated to the ground beside Karvel. There was no mistaking the pilot’s gesture, but Karvel stood motionless, staring at the plane. It was a mere circular box on a thick, circular platform, and seeing it land did not wholly convince him that it would fly.
The pilot gestured again, and took off while Karvel was clambering over the side. They shot upward a doz
en feet, and then moved slowly. The men on the ground drifted together into a tight group, and stood looking after them. It was not until they began to gather speed that Karvel realized they were traveling away from the city.
He asked a question, looking closely at the pilot for the first time.
Excitedly the pilot spoke gibberish, waved an arm, spoke again. His left hand rested on a pattern of raised, rectangular surfaces, and he fingered this keyboard as casually as a skilled musician would play a piano. Their course altered slightly; their speed increased. Curving wings on their seat backs folded forward and encircled them snugly. A transparent canopy glided over them. The pilot grinned a leering, toothless grin.
“Look, friend—I don’t want to run away,” Karvel said.
The pilot grinned, and spoke more gibberish. Karvel gestured unavailingly in the direction of the rapidly receding city. They sped onward, still at a nerve-shattering twelve-foot altitude.
“Am I being rescued or kidnapped?” Karvel demanded. He glanced backward, and snapped, “Get some altitude, you fool!” The other aircraft had taken up their pursuit.
Several large planes converged above them. One at a time they began to dart down in swooping passes. Head twisting, eyes aglow with ecstatic delight, the pilot wove his way skillfully between the thrusts, changed direction, stood the plane on edge, even managed to gain a little altitude. The city was far behind them, now—no more than a reflected glow on the horizon. Ahead of them the level stubble of the grainfield ended abruptly at the feet of heavily forested hills.
Seconds later two of the pursuing planes managed a coordinated attack, boxed them in neatly, and forced them down into the forest. They plowed through heavy foliage, tilted, spun crazily, and slid to the ground, coming to rest wedged at a steep angle between two trees.
The canopy opened, the seats unfolded, and the pilot stood up to peer about him in apparent perplexity.
“This is what comes of not taking altitude when you can get it,” Karvel told him disapprovingly.
It was no mere forest that they had crashed into, but a dense jungle. The trees were enormous, and their huge leaves blotted out the sky and produced an effect of eerie twilight. Their trunks bulged with strange fungus growths, and thick curtains of leaves hung motionless on long, ropelike vines. A noisy cloud of small insects churned in a shaft of sunlight.
The pilot leaped to the ground and studied the plane with cocked head.
“If it’s a question of getting out of this predicament,” Karvel said, with a mystified glance at the control keyboard, “you’ll have to work it out for yourself. I move that we start walking.”
He climbed down himself, lifted out his knapsack and rifle, and took a few suggestive steps. The pilot, still surveying the plane from the vantage point of his eight feet of height, ignored Karvel.
A curtain of vines parted, and a man stepped through. Enormously tall, bald, toothless, he could have been the pilot’s brother except for his dark-hued skin and his clothing. He wore the same type of flapping garment, but his was a dark brown, irregularly splashed with darker blotches. He carried two long poles, each of them tipped with a long, vicious-looking barbed spike.
Other men appeared noiselessly. Soon there were seven of them, standing beside the plane and talking excitedly with the pilot. Karvel withdrew to the opposite side, where he could feel somewhat less like a midget.
The pilot climbed back into the plane and closed the canopy, and it lifted slowly. As it turned edgewise and drifted free, the forest men went to work with their poles, hooking vines away from it and clearing a path. The plane floated off through the jungle at a walking pace, with the men moving ahead in relays to clear the way for it.
Quickly they disappeared. Karvel stood contemplating the wall of greenery that closed after them, but only for a moment. He had lost his sense of direction in their spinning descent, and the forest impressed him as an excellent place in which to get lost. He hurried to overtake them.
The ground began to rise steeply. The procession zigzagged among the trees, and finally, after a long climb, broke through into a small clearing where vines and undergrowth had been removed but the dense overhead foliage left untouched. Three forest roads converged there, broad, arched tunnels that vanished in sweeping detours around the gigantic trees. The pilot set the plane down and climbed out, and the entire party moved single file up a ramp that spiraled around a tree at the edge of the clearing.
Karvel followed gingerly, and cursed his curiosity long before he reached the top. The ramp was woven of thick fiber and supported by huge pegs driven into the tree. It sagged alarmingly between its supports, and the fiber parted when Karvel attempted to use his cane. The tree’s bark was too smooth and slippery to afford a handhold. Karvel fell far behind the others, but eventually he caught up with them at a platform fixed high up in the treetop.
The jungle stretched away at his feet like a green sea stirred whimsically by a gentle wind. Beyond lay the harvested grainfield, and drawn up near the edge of the forest was the vanguard of an army. Large aircraft were landing, disgorging their cargos of men, taking off again. The newcomers hurried to extend the long ranks of waiting troops.
On the crowded platform the forest men talked quietly. One was studying the assembling army with an optical device. The pilot grinned at Karvel, signaled with a jerk of his head, and turned away. Karvel stepped cautiously after him, and found the descent even more nerve-wracking than the climb.
As they gained the clearing again a group of men approached along one of the roads, their poles shouldered like enormous rifles. At a shouted command they vanished into the forest, leaving not so much as a swaying vine to mark their passage.
The pilot beckoned to Karvel from the plane, but he stood watching dumbly as another group of men approached the clearing. No one, he told himself, not even a Bowden Karvel with mountains in his soul, could possibly blunder an important diplomatic mission this badly.
His arrival had smashed a city, and killed or maimed untold thousands of its citizens.
And then, within two hours, his presence had precipitated a war.
Wearily he climbed into the plane. Tilted at a steep angle, they flew off along a forest road. The packed earth of the road unrolled monotonously beneath them, and the dim, unchanging greenery of the tunnel walls floated past in a hypnotic blur. Karvel found himself struggling to stay awake. He needed urgently to plan, to make decisions, to act, but fatigue had paralyzed his mental processes. He felt an overwhelming weight of exhaustion from the centuries he had—perhaps—passed through. His head nodded again, and he succumbed to the drowsiness that was enveloping him, and slept.
The eerie forest twilight was shading into forest night when the pilot shook him awake. Dimly he could make out another clearing, with several aircraft parked around its perimeter. He gathered up his equipment and followed the pilot, attempting to stomp himself awake. The footing changed abruptly from soft forest turf to hard ground, and ahead of them a door creaked as the pilot opened it. A few steps in total darkness, and another door opened onto a blaze of light.
Karvel’s eyes quickly recovered, but the shock he received from his surroundings lasted longer. Future man had returned to the cave.
He blinked incredulously at the high, jagged arch of the ceiling. Bands of brilliant yet soft artificial light crisscrossed it. An alcove contained what appeared to be startlingly advanced communications equipment. At one side of the room food sizzled on an enormous, gleaming grill, and the men of the forest were helping themselves with casual dips of long-handled tongs—and dropping the portions of food into crude wooden bowls, from which they ate with their fingers.
Long, wicker-like benches were scattered about the huge room, and the grinning pilot led Karvel to one of them, and got him seated. The forest men gathered around him. With the open curiosity of children they touched his hair, touched his clothing, ran their fingers along the barrel of his rifle, seemed fascinated with his cane. As one stepped ba
ck, apparently satisfied, another took his place.
The pilot returned to offer Karvel a bowl of deeply browned balls of food. He accepted with a nod of thanks, and cautiously placed one in his mouth. It disintegrated into a thick paste before he could begin to chew it. A highly appropriate food, he thought, for a people who had no teeth and—what was it the report had said?—no stomachs. “Prechewed and predigested meat balls,” he told himself wryly.
But he doubted that they were made of meat. The taste was strong and not unpleasant, with a vaguely familiar flavor that he could not identify. He washed the mouthful down with a drink of a mildly fermented fruit juice, and began to eat hungrily.
The pilot had disappeared; the forest men drifted away and went about their own affairs, which involved much coming and going. In the full light Karvel realized for the first time that their dark faces were green-tinted, as were the blotches on their clothing. There were fewer of them in the room than he had thought. Their tremendous size, and his dazzled senses, had combined to magnify an under-strength platoon into a company.
He searched vainly for a sign that one of those present was a person with authority, and regretted that he could not ask, tritely, to be taken to their leader. His first brushes with the language barrier had left him shaken and discouraged, and convinced that Haskins should have sent a linguist.
For a time he occupied himself with checking over his equipment. Nothing seemed damaged, not even his flashlight. He packed it away again, wondering if the pressure he experienced could possibly have been a sensorial illusion. Certainly there had been nothing illusionary about the condition of the other U.O. passengers.
The night wore on slowly, and Karvel stretched out on the bench’s uncomfortably ridged surface and attempted to inventory the errors he had made since his arrival. Finally he reduced them to one: he should not have left the U.O.; but he could not retrace his steps without passing through, or over, two hostile armies.
The Fury Out of Time Page 10
