The Fury Out of Time

by Biggle Jr. , Lloyd

  “Behave yourselves,” Karvel told the Earthmen, “and nothing will happen to you.”

  They placed Franur and his assistant in one room and the Earthmen in another, and blocked the doors with packing cases.

  “It’s easy,” Marnox said, sounding disappointed.

  “It hasn’t even started yet,” Karvel told him.

  He summoned the Galds with a wave of his hand, and began the long, cautious climb to the administration levels.

  They met no one on the ramps, and at the Overseer’s level they crept silently along the last corridor to look into an empty administration room. Puzzled, Karvel angled across to the message center, rifle held at the ready. He halted in the entrance, and a gasp whistled shrilly in his ear as Marnox came to a stop behind him.

  Sirgan lay near the door, clothing ripped away, his body crisscrossed with deep slashes that terminated in gruesome ribbons of flesh. His face was torn almost unrecognizably. The body of an Earthwoman lay nearby, untouched except for a crushed skull. The horribly mutilated bodies of two communications technicians lay among their scattered instruments, their slashed faces still oozing blood. Equipment, smashed and spattered with gore, littered the room.

  The Galds hung in the doorway, dazed and speechless. Karvel turned his back on the carnage, and thrust them away. “Did the Overseer keep some kind of animals here?” he asked.

  They gazed at him dumbly.

  “We’d better stay together,” Karvel said. He led them out through the administration room, hesitated for a moment in the corridor, and then resolutely turned toward the ramps. On the ground level they released the supply personnel, and Karvel hurried everyone back to the landing dome and placed them in the cargo carrier.

  “Don’t open up to anyone or anything until I come back,” he said. “If I don’t come back—you work it out. You’d best return to Earth, I suppose.”

  “What was it?” Marnox asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll tell you when I find out—if I’m in any condition to tell you.”

  He turned away, checking his rifle again. A leopard or a tiger could have made wounds like that. If a ferocious beast were loose in the dome’s maze of corridors, he didn’t want his hunt impeded by thirteen unarmed men.

  He found two more of the Overseer’s staff in their quarters. Dead. Slashed horribly. He found another in a corridor beyond the administration room, and two in a small storage room. They had sought refuge there, but the light sliding door had been crushed in.

  Reluctantly he turned toward the women’s quarters. Where the corridor forked into two sections Karvel found the body of a man, so flayed with claw marks that only surmise told him it was the Overseer. He stepped gingerly over the body and the pool of blood that surrounded it.

  In the farthest room he found the women, at least thirty of them—alive, huddled together, most of them with blood-soaked clothing, though their faces were miraculously untouched. All were in deep shock, some sobbing tearlessly, some moaning inanities, some staring sightlessly at nothing at all.

  Then he noticed their hands, and their long, knifelike, blood-caked fingernails, and he understood.

  He found Wilurzil in a room on the other corridor, crumpled in a corner as though flung there. The orange beard hung loosely from one side of her face. He straightened out her body and carefully rearranged her torn clothing before he realized that she was only unconscious.

  He went for water and sprinkled it onto her face. Her eyes opened. She regarded him with horror, and raised her arms to defend herself before she recognized him.

  “Is he…dead?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Karvel said. “What happened?”

  She shuddered. “I don’t know. Did you kill him?”

  “No.”

  “The others…the women—”

  “Yes.”

  “I talked to them about their cities, the way you talked to the Unclaimed People about their trees. They hated him, but they were afraid.”

  She lapsed into a fit of coughing. Karvel offered water to her, but she pushed it away. “He taught me the silent speech,” she said. “It is very simple, once the symbols are understood.”

  “Yes,” Karvel said. Simple for a highly talented linguist.

  “I found the franchise, and was…was listening to it, listening to the silent speech—”

  “Was it in an Earth language?”

  “It was in all of the Earth languages. For the people of Earth to listen to, only the Overseer concealed it.”

  Karvel nodded. “He wouldn’t want the people of Earth to know what it said.”

  “He found me listening to it. I ran, but he caught me and was choking me, and then the women came. They killed him?”

  “Yes. Is the U.O. still here?”

  “I…think so.” She covered her face with her hands, and spoke haltingly. “The franchise. Don’t you want to know about the franchise? You said it was important.”

  “It might be very important.”

  “He did not want to teach me the silent speech. He was suspicious, but I insisted…I refused—”

  She broke off, and with a gesture the symbolism of which Karvel could only guess at, she stripped the beard from her face and flung it aside. “I should have done it before,” she whispered, “but he liked me to wear it.”

  Gently Karvel pulled her hands away from her face, and held them. “What is in the franchise?”

  “It is very long and difficult to understand. Many of the words are strange, and I cannot remember them exactly. It says the…something…is empowered—”

  “Trading organization?” Karvel suggested.

  “The something with a strange name…is empowered— no, is…something…to supply the needs of the planet Earth, and is empowered to accept in return—it is very complicated.”

  “Products?”

  “Many things. The produce of mines, agriculture, manufacturing, forests—many, many things.”

  “Does it mention people?”

  “I don’t think so. No. Is that important?”

  “Very important. Don’t you understand? There is a government somewhere, and Earth is of special concern to it. The franchise is supposed to protect and help the people of Earth. The Overseer and his trading organization perverted it into an instrument of exploitation. If what you remember is correct, Earth can refuse to trade its people, and the trading organization will have to accept whatever is offered. How do vou feel? Can you walk?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’ll go after Marnox and the others. Do you want to come with me, or would you rather wait here?”

  She shuddered. “I’ll come with you.”

  They found the U.O. in a storage room, still sealed, wedged to a circular platform. “How do we move it?” Karvel asked.

  “It moves itself,” Marnox said with a grin, and he stepped onto the platform and flew it slowly down the tunnel to the landing dome and aboard the cargo carrier.

  The Galds searched the administrative levels for the dead, and brought them to the administration room. Finally there were fourteen—twelve men and two women. Six men were found alive in remote corridors where they had taken refuge. The three scientists in the distant research dome were unaware that anything had happened.

  While they worked Wilurzil resumed her decipherment of the franchise. She spoke into a voice recorder what she could read of the strange symbols that were embossed on a long strip of flexible metal.

  Karvel conferred with Marnox. “I’m placing you in charge of the base,” he said. “I’ll take the women and some of the Overseer’s men back with me, and leave you enough Galds to look after the rest. If they give you any trouble—”

  “They won’t give me any trouble,” Marnox said, caressing his blackjack. “But who’ll fly you back?”

  “The same pilot who brought us up.”

  “What if he won’t?”

  “Once he sees what’s in the administration room, he’ll be just as eager to leave as I am. T
here are a couple of Shuttles out, and at least one cargo carrier, so be on the lookout for them. I’ll send more men to you just as soon as I can. The cargo carrier will transport at least fifty.”

  They left until last the delicate task of escorting the women to the landing dome. Most of them went passively, but a few became hysterical and had to be restrained. Wilurzil did not balk until her turn came to board the cargo carrier.

  “You brought all these men here,” she said accusingly, pointing at the Galds. “You came to capture the Overseer.”

  Karvel made no reply.

  “You would have captured him. There was no need to kill him. You did not want him dead.”

  Again Karvel had no answer.

  “But I wanted him dead!” she said defiantly.

  Then she broke down completely.

  At Lewir, Karvel turned the women over to the doctors. He could only hope that their skill in psychiatry equaled their surgical achievements.

  He was immediately caught up in a frenzy of activity, and he had no time for vain regrets, for soul-searching—even for mountain climbing. So exhausted was he that for one night he actually slept soundly.

  A leader had to be appointed to fill the Overseer’s role in arbitrating disputes and managing supplies. The communications apparatus on the moon had to be repaired and manned, careful plans made to deal with the trading organization if it proved truculent, a mission appointed to return on the next spaceship to establish a direct link with the government of worlds. Karvel anticipated that the trading organization would not surrender without a fight, and he felt certain that it would have potent political influence. He did not find it easy to explain this to men who had no concept of politics, but he did his best.

  And it was not his problem. As much as he would have liked to help, to learn more about man’s far-flung civilization, it was not his problem. He repeated that until he had halfway convinced himself.

  He collected an advisory board of engineers and technicians and went to work on the U.O.

  He faced three inexorable terrors: pressure, time, and space.

  If temporal pressure continued to increase as long as the U.O. was in continuous operation, it would kill him. It had come within a straw’s weight of killing him on the journey to the future; the journey to the past would be twice as long.

  If somehow he found a way to survive the pressure, time and space would kill him with disappointment and frustration—or old age.

  He had no notion of the actual distance he would be traveling, but he knew that the most trivial of errors—say a mistake of a mere hundredth of a per cent—could be magnified to a staggering one hundred years on a journey that spanned a million. As far as he could tell, the U.O.’s instruments were not even designed to achieve that accuracy. If he made his instrument settings with an admittedly impossible precision, he could still miss his destination by a long lifetime!

  He would take an extra supply of fuel and be prepared to make additional time jumps from his first stopping point, but in what direction, and how far?

  If through some outlandish contortion of coincidence he did arrive at the correct point in time, he would probably never know it. The U.O.’s three landing places in the twentieth century had been a continent or a hemisphere apart. If Karvel opened the U.O.’s hatch and found himself alone on a lifeless Earth, should he assume that his error was one of time or space?

  The empty fuel tank of the U.O.-2 and his uncertainty regarding the original instrument settings mocked all of his calculations. He must arrive at a precise time and a precise place—and the task seemed hopeless.

  His advisory board had no suggestions. So remote to their experience were such problems that they did not seem to understand what he was talking about. He sent them home and called in a crew of Bribun’s mechanics.

  He had long meditated the fact that the pressure that almost killed him had not damaged the most delicate items of his equipment. The equipment had been packed tightly into small cylinders; the passenger cylinder had been designed for comfort, with ample room for movement and with wasteful inches of foam padding. Could the pressure Within the cylinder be somehow related to its volume of empty space? He reasoned that it could.

  The padding was ripped out and replaced with form-fitting armor built for him by the Bribs. Karvel would lie in Spartan discomfort in the tight embrace of a cylinder within a cylinder. If his theory were correct, the pressure would build up much more slowly in the cramped confines of the inner cylinder. If it were wrong, the discomfort would not bother him for long.

  He would have to take his chances with time and space.

  Three times he interrupted his preparations to call on Wilurzil.

  She did not recognize him.

  The ultimatums in forty languages he collected into a neat package, along with the Overseer’s translation, and left it for her. On the back of one of them he carefully lettered, in English, a brief message of thanks and farewell.

  Someday perhaps she would overcome her horror and attempt to decipher it.

  PART THREE

  Chapter 1

  Karvel lay in supine discomfort in the armor fashioned by the Bribs, and his only sensation was a growing awareness of a protruding seam under his right shoulder. The sharpening pain in his shoulder helped to alleviate the monotony.

  Time passed.

  Then the pressure began to tighten. Its first feathery touch was like a door opening on a half-forgotten nightmare, and slowly, ever so slowly, it intensified.

  Suddenly Karvel felt a vibration. In an instant it had become a violent pulsation that shook the cylinder and set his armor to rattling noisily. Alarmed, he cautiously pressed upward. The cylinder opened.

  The vibration cut off as he was squirming out of his armor. He dilated the U.O.’s hatch and looked out.

  The U.O. was revolving slowly, but for the moment he ignored that phenomenon. Twice before he had witnessed the ravages of Force X, and neither time had it struck with the pulverizing speed and fury that now spiraled away from him.

  He was looking out from the top of a low, wooded hill— what had been a wooded hill. It was now almost bare, except for stumps. The shredded trees had been flung far down the slope. Toward the bottom a few scattered trees remained standing, spared by the gap between the spirals, and Force X rushed on to spend itself on a bleak, featureless prairie.

  Something moved in the distance, something the fury had missed. Karvel blinked at it. “Kangaroos?” he asked himself. The creatures did not hop, but walked with delicate, mincing steps, unaware of the crushing force that had just whipped past them.

  Karvel ducked back inside and removed the U.O.’s critical activating instrument. He opened a supply cylinder and tucked the capsule into his knapsack. Then he squirmed through the hatch.

  The U.O. was still revolving slowly, and the ground was three feet further down than he expected. The drop staggered him, and he backed off from the U.O., staring. It rested in a thick metal cup, like a golf ball on a tee, and the cup was revolving.

  “A time beacon!” Karvel exclaimed.

  A time beacon with a homing device, something to reach out through both time and space when the U.O. approached, and draw it back to its starting point. And the vibration…

  “A signal,” Karvel pronounced. “I hope whoever receives it has the good sense to wait until Force X has run down.”

  He circled the U.O. In one direction Force X was inflicting its final outrages on a sparse growth of trees. A small stream meandered toward him, curving around the base of the hill. In another direction the parched brown of the prairie merged with the horizon. Karvel moved on. A vast expanse of water gleamed in the distance, and the birds circling above it were slowly drifting specks in the sky. He moved again, and saw the water curve back to lose itself in the lush vegetation of an enormous swamp.

  No direction looked promising, least of all the swamp; but from the swamp they came, bursting forth in a frenzied, stumbling rush. The vanguard sudd
enly went sprawling— perhaps Force X, now well above the ground, had whipped overhead—but it quickly regained its feet and floundered forward. They were too far away for Karvel to see them distinctly. They looked, in fact, like so many barrels scooting toward him, and that was indication enough that he’d found the unhuman beings.

  Karvel thought wearily, “Another language to learn.”

  Haskins should have sent a linguist.

  He restrained the urge to dash out and meet them. A freakish, four-limbed creature such as himself was probably the last thing they expected to see. Instead he moved out of sight behind the U.O. and continued to watch.

  Some ran on all six limbs, some on four. A few were upright on two, but their straining eagerness kept tipping them forward. Many of them had been carrying long poles—”Not nut poles again,” Karvel groaned—but they were losing them along the way.

  A hundred yards from the hill they began to falter. By ones, by twos, by small groups they slowed to a halt, sifted forward, and finally arranged themselves in ranks, like ancient infantry massing for an assault.

  Karvel retreated a short distance down the slope, seated himself on the shattered trunk of a tree, and waited. For a time he admired the distant, effortless soaring of a strange bird of slight body and enormous wingspread, and then he stared in disbelief at the buzzing gyrations of a cloud of enormous insects. Of all that he had seen, the tree whose trunk he was sitting on puzzled him the most. It was recognizably some ordinary species of elm.

  When finally one of the creatures appeared, it did not approach the U.O. It moved directly toward Karvel and halted a long stride from him as others gathered just below the crest of the hill. Karvel, his carefully planned gesture of friendship forgotten, could do nothing but remain motionless and stare. Strange as the scientists’ description had been, it had not prepared him for the incredible weirdness he saw before him.

  Then the thing spoke.

  Its voice was as unbelievable as its appearance. Karvel thought instantly of a bagpipe, for the thick wheeze of its speech was projected against hissing tones reminiscent of a bagpipe’s drone. The sounds emerged from the creature’s abdomen; rather, they originated and remained there. Its speech reverberated inside its body, and the longer it spoke the more blurred the words became.