The Fury Out of Time

by Biggle Jr. , Lloyd

  “What are thirty Earth-days when an enormous span of time is traversed? It amazes me that the sphere managed consistently to strike the same year.”

  “Agreed. Even if the U.O.’s controls measure time in days, a microscopic error might produce a difference of many days at a distant point in time. Anyway, U.O.-2 reached us first, and once that is understood it is immediately obvious that there was only one U.O.”

  “This I have believed from the beginning.”

  “You didn’t have a paradox of chronology to confuse you, and the Bribs operated without any scientific experts to confuse them. There was only one U.O. The one we called U.O.-2, which reached us second, did not have the marks our scientists put on U.O.-1. It couldn’t have had them until it had been sent to the future and returned again—thirty days earlier. If you can follow that.”

  “Not precisely, but I agree with the conclusion. Where does such a conclusion take us?”

  “To another question. Where did the unhuman being come from? I guessed the future, because I felt certain that man would eventually encounter intelligent life forms on other planets.”

  “That depends on what you mean by intelligent,” the Overseer said. “Man has explored far into the galaxy, but to my knowledge he has yet to find humanlike intelligence, with a civilization and a technology. I would not be so rash as to claim that he never will, but thus far he has not. The galaxy is a vast expanse of frightening distances, and its distances are not the most frightening thing about it. Man has not even explored half, little is known of much that he has explored, and no one man has mastered all of that. The reference center of such a minor planet is limited in its resources, but I will make inquiry about your unhuman being. I will also ask my headquarters to institute a search, though that will not help us immediately. Tell me, please, all that you can remember of this creature.”

  “An estimated five feet tall when standing,” Karvel said. “It had a thick, barrellike body, with an enormous brain located in the upper central part of it. There was no separate head. There were incipient or vestigial wings, the scientists thought vestigial. There was something strange about the blood—a question as to whether it really was blood, in the sense that we have blood. There were six limbs, but the scientists refused to designate them either arms or legs. They terminated in something that didn’t resemble hands or feet. There was disagreement as to its visual capabilities, probably due to the fact that its eyes were no longer recognizable as such. They couldn’t find any mouth, either, or figure out how it breathed. It did have a lung of some kind. I’m sorry I can’t remember more, but the report was handed to me as I was leaving, and I only glanced at it.”

  “Surely that should be sufficient,” the Overseer said. “If you will excuse me, please, I shall make the inquiry.”

  Karvel leaned back and attempted to concentrate on the serenely glowing planet Earth. A six-limbed, scantily winged, headless vision marched across it, and he damned Haskins for neglecting to show him the report until the last minute. If he’d had the opportunity to study it properly, perhaps his recollection of it would have sounded less like a secondhand description of a hallucination.

  The Overseer returned to his lounge, and said gravely, “Your unhuman being is unknown to our reference center. I have addressed an inquiry to headquarters, but I very much doubt that it will help us. If such a creature existed, surely it would be important enough to merit description in any reference center.”

  Karvel nodded, keeping his eyes fixed meditatively on the sky.

  “I greatly fear that the problem is unsolvable,” the

  Overseer went on. “With the galaxy as vast as it is, it would be difficult enough to locate this creature in space. If we must also search for it in time, the situation becomes impossible.”

  “The fact that man hasn’t made contact with such a life form doesn’t mean that he won’t,” Karvel protested. “And since it reaches us out of time—”

  “The unhuman being may come from an uncertain future. Possibly, but that is not really helpful to us. How would we begin to search for it? And before we began to search, we would have to ask ourselves if we really wanted to find it!”

  “Your time, and mine, have been sending the U.O. back and forth through the simple expedient of reversing the instrument settings,” Karvel said. “That couldn’t possibly have worked with U.O.-2, because U.O.-2 didn’t come from you. It just occurred to me that I don’t know where the instruments were set when the unhuman being arrived, and, I doubt if the scientists knew. They said U.O.-2 had been handled carelessly; probably the instruments were tampered with before they saw them. The instrument settings may have been meaningless anyway, because U.O.-2 arrived with an empty fuel tank. What if it arrived where it did merely because it ran out of fuel?”

  “That would indeed be a paradox,” the Overseer admitted.

  “That’s only the beginning. U.O.-2’s empty fuel tank was refilled with fuel we made after we analyzed the fuel it contained on its second arrival, which came first. I think I’m getting a headache. If the future—you—hadn’t returned the U.O. to us so as to arrive before we sent it to you, we wouldn’t have been able to send it to you in the first place. Rather, in the second place. We wouldn’t have known what instrument setting to use, and we wouldn’t have been able to refuel it. Do you follow me?”

  “I do,” the Overseer said with a smile, “but I’m not certain that I want to. Was there no residue of fuel in the tank that could have been analyzed?”

  “I simply don’t know. I’m reasonably certain that it wasn’t analyzed, because that had already been done. Did the Bribs have any difficulty with the fuel?”

  “There we have another paradox, or at least a puzzle. The fuel used by the U.O. is identical to the fuel we use to maintain our cities and operate our machines. It brought you to the moon, and it has taken man far into the galaxy. Our scientists call it the perfect fuel. That your people could have evolved an extensive technology without it is more bewildering to me than your time paradoxes.”

  “Not to me,” Karvel said dryly.

  “My instinct demands that both time and the events it controls should be immutable, so I say that the earlier return of the sphere did not change events, but merely facilitated them. I say that, but I am not wholly satisfied with it.”

  “Neither am I. Because I’m convinced that man acquired the perfect fuel only because an unhuman being traveled in time.”

  “The instrument setting on the U.O.-2 must have in some way confirmed the conclusions you had already reached. Is it possible that the instruments were set twice as far?”

  “And the U.O. was ‘returned’ by halving the settings? No, I don’t think that could be possible.”

  “I agree, and I think that it eliminates the possibility that the unhuman being reached you from an even more remote future. Supposing the setting was identical with the one you had already used?”

  “Identical,” Karvel mused. “And if the French were handling the U.O. carelessly, they didn’t photograph the instruments on arrival. Later they saw our photographs, and heard about our using an opposite instrument setting, and by that time the instruments had been fussed with and changed and they’d forgotten the original settings. Or perhaps they thought someone had already changed them to the settings we used.” He paused. “The spiral! When U.O.-2 arrived, Force X spiraled clockwise instead of counterclockwise, which could mean that it arrived from the opposite direction. But in that case—”

  “You say it, my friend.”

  “In that case—” Karvel’s voice broke. He could not meet the Overseer’s eyes, and his own whispered words rang thunderously in his ears. “In that case, the U.O. did not originate anywhere in the future. It came from the past.”

  Chapter 6

  A man compelled to climb mountains did his most exhausting work at night; and when the dead of Galdu forced him into perspiring wakefulness with their screaming concert, and when Lieutenant Ostrander’s head jerked
back through the U.O.’s hatch to vanish once again into the crush of time (what should he have said to him?) Karvel lay gazing at the dimly glowing ceiling, and climbed.

  And climbed.

  When he had quite convinced himself that the summit was hopelessly beyond his reach, he left his quarters and walked.

  The moon base was enormous. A gigantic dome pimpled with observation bubbles, it lay at the jagged edge of the Mare Imbrium, in the yawning mouth of the great Alpine Valley gorge. At the other end of a connecting tube was a smaller dome, the landing dome, and the complex viewed from above gave the impression of a lopsided dumbbell. Nearby were a number of lesser domes, surmounting a complex network of underground tunnels.

  The base was enormous—and virtually empty. At some time in the dim past it had been a thriving city, perhaps a crucial steppingstone in man’s first awkward lurch toward the stars. Now human aspiration had passed it by, and it was as barren and meaningless as a monument to a forgotten battle.

  The Overseer and his staff occupied the dome’s two highest levels, and did not need a fraction of that space. The ground level was a supply depot, and much of the remainder of the dome was sealed off. But there were miles of corridors for Karvel to walk, and miles of ramps for him to descend and climb; and when the ghosts of Galdu screamed, and Lieutenant Ostrander’s young face smiled, and clouds obscured the unattainable mountain peaks, Karvel left his sleeping pad to pace the corridors with the long, gliding strides that the moon’s low gravity made possible.

  It was another morning after such a sleepless night—a moon base morning but not a moon morning, because outside the base the sun would not rise for more than a week—when Karvel tiredly entered the Overseer’s administration room. Sirgan, the Overseer’s assistant, looked up from a food tray, nodded, and grinned between swallows. As in Dunzalo and the caves of the Unclaimed People, food was always at one’s elbow. The Overseer and his staff members consumed ridiculously small amounts of food several times an hour. They thought Karvel’s custom of eating three meals a day incredible, and the dazzling quantities of food he was able to dispatch at those gargantuan repasts shocked them.

  At least the Overseer’s food was genuine food. It dissolved in the mouth, but it had meat in it, and more than an illusion of substance.

  “Will you take food?” Sirgan asked.

  “Thank you. I’ve already eaten.”

  “The Overseer is occupied.”

  “I know,” Karvel said curtly. He had heard his laughter booming down the corridor from the women’s quarters.

  Karvel circled the vast room and turned away. He hadn’t come there to see anyone. He was merely walking. He had trod down the nerve-wracking visions of the night, and now he was at work on the harsh facts of day—the facts he had acquired since arriving on the moon.

  The Overseer had arranged for the compensation of the cities claiming Karvel and the U.O. The U.O. was now the property of the Overseer.

  So was Karvel.

  The Overseer was as coolly brilliant and as suavely unscrupulous a person as Karvel had ever met, and thus far he had made only one mistake. He had assumed that a man from the Earth’s past would be as blindly naive as the Earth people he was accustomed to dealing with.

  Unfortunately, with Karvel virtually a prisoner at the moon base, the mistake was unlikely to cost him anything. Karvel still had his knife and pistol, but he could think of no effective use for them. What he needed was a plan of searching ingenuity.

  Sirgan, still gumming his last mouthful of food, overtook him in the corridor. “The Overseer said I was to show you around, if you like, and tell you anything you want to know.”

  “Anything?” Karvel asked with a grin. He didn’t believe it, but there was always the possibility that he might be shown, or told, more than was intended. “Let’s go.”

  Sirgan was a lesser edition of the Overseer—a younger man, of a medium seven and three-quarters feet in height and the same sturdy build. His eyes were deeply sunken and gleamed a depthless black, as though they had looked upon the aggregate evil of the universe and found it wanting. Like the Overseer, he seemed at his sinister worst when he was trying to appear friendly.

  Karvel found little of interest on the administration levels. The reference center was an electronic marvel that occupied a suite of rooms, but it had already failed to answer the one question Karvel wanted to ask. A bank of machines performed the clerical work for a planet. Only in the message center was there human activity. Half of the Overseer’s staff consisted of communications men, and they worked in shifts to handle the supply orders and the claims and complaints of Earth’s cities.

  On the lower levels, an overweight villain named Franur ran the supply depot with an assistant, a small crew of Earthmen, and a large number of machines. Franur’s bulk intrigued Karvel, who hadn’t thought that anyone could gain weight on the diet he was experiencing. After a cautious question or two he attributed it to gland trouble.

  “The depot handles mostly fuel, fertilizer, and metals,” Sirgan said, “but it has to have a little of almost everything on hand for emergencies. The supplies they don’t get much call for are stored below. Would you like to see them?”

  Karvel said no, and Sirgan led him through a long underground tunnel to one of the small domes. A scientific detachment was at work there, three bored individuals wandering about in a maze of instruments.

  “They’re studying the sun,” Sirgan said. “It’s part of a galaxy-wide research project—of the known galaxy, that is. Suns of various ages are being studied, and there’ll be experiments to learn to control a sun’s expenditure of energy, or regulate its aging, or some such thing.”

  “What will the experiments do to the Earth?”

  Sirgan shrugged. “I suppose the people would be removed if any danger developed. An old, exhausted system like this one can’t be maintained forever. Earth has to import too many things. The quantity of soil nutrients needed just to maintain its agriculture is shocking. At present the trade is profitable to us, but this may not always be the case.”

  “What does an exhausted planet have to trade?”

  Sirgan looked surprised. “Why—people! Earth natives are much in demand. The men make quite the best spaceship crews available—in positions of nonresponsibility, of course. Their self-contained city life conditions them to a crowded existence, I suppose, and they are trained to give complete obedience to whomever owns them. In certain specialized environments they are immeasurably superior to any other people. There is a substantial market for them. Earthwomen are also much in demand. They have a loyalty to their owners that isn’t easily found in women these days.” He grinned. “They have other qualities that are also justly famous, but no doubt you know about those from experience.”

  Karvel considered himself anything but a stuffy moralist, and that shocked him. He could only ask weakly, “Don’t the cities of Earth take any interest in what happens to their citizens after they trade them?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Are there other worlds where people are used in trade?”

  Sirgan was thoughtful for a moment. “I don’t know of any. That’s another reason the people of Earth are so much in demand, I suppose. It’s a venerable practice on Earth. They’ve been trading people among themselves for so long that it probably seemed perfectly natural to start trading them away from Earth when Earth’s resources gave out. But all that is ancient history.”

  “The one thing I don’t understand is where they get the people. I haven’t seen a child since I arrived.”

  “There are no children at Dunzalo. The Unclaimed People are unique in that their women still bear children, but they keep the women and children segregated. Where else have you been? Bribun? I believe there is a small nursery at Bribun, probably a throwback to the time before the cities began to specialize.”

  “I wasn’t there long enough to see it.”

  “Galdu has one of the largest nurseries on the planet, and fortun
ately it wasn’t damaged. But you didn’t actually go to Galdu.”

  “You make the production of people sound as easy as growing grain. Instead of trading for them, why don’t you grow your own?”

  Sirgan regarded him indignantly. “If you’d seen the nurseries, you wouldn’t ask that. It’s a horribly complicated process, the children require many years of highly specialized care, and the environment has to be precisely right if the adult is to be worth anything in trade. Really, it’s much easier to trade for them.”

  “And—only the women of the Unclaimed People bear children?”

  “The Unclaimed People are strange in many ways. It was once thought that they would make excellent pioneers for the settlement of new planets, but that didn’t work out at all. We even supplied them with those silly nuts they insist on eating, but the entire colony died off. We still don’t know why. Evidently something in their forest environment is lacking elsewhere.”

  Karvel nodded. “Trees. What do the Unclaimed People trade?”

  “The products of their forests. They need very little themselves—fuel, very rarely a replacement machine or plane. They wouldn’t trade their people even if we had a use for them. Would you like to learn about the sun experiments?”

  “No,” Karvel said. “I doubt if I’d understand them anyway. What else is there to see?”

  “Very little, unless you’d like to explore the old mine. This was once the most important mine on the moon, which accounts for the size of the base.”

  “I suppose it’s exhausted.”

  “Long ago. That’s ancient history, too. The legend is that ore from the moon took man to the stars. ‘Wrought of Mother Earth, fired with the strength of Luna,’ an old saga goes. Or something like that. I don’t believe a word of it, but there’s no doubt that the moon once had many rich mineral deposits. The most important mining bases are still here. You can see the locations on the maps in the administration room. Things remain very much the same on the moon, unless man changes them.”