The Legion of Time

by Jack Williamson

  Lanning caught a sobbing breath.

  “All right, beautiful,” he gasped. “I don’t know the game. But—you’re on.”

  He climbed upon the rail, in the starlight, and reached out his hand to take Sorainya’s.

  “Denny—wait!” spoke an urgent voice beside him.

  Lanning drew back instinctively, and saw Lethonee. A ghostly figure in her straight white robe, she was standing by the rail, holding the great jewel of time between her hands. Her face was drawn, desperate.

  “Remember, Denny!” her warning rang out. “Sorainya would destroy you.”

  Sorainya stood stark upright upon the shell, her tense defiant body splendid in the scarlet armor. Slitted, her greenish eyes flamed with tigerish fury. Strong teeth flashed white in a snarl of hate. She hissed an unfamiliar word, and spat at Lethonee.

  Lethonee trembled, and caught a sobbing breath. Her face had drained to a deadly white, and her violet eyes were flaming. One word rang from her lips: “Go!”

  But Sorainya turned to Lanning again, and a slow smile drew across the blackness of her hate. Her long bare arms opened again.

  “Come with me, Denny,” she whispered. “And let that lying ghost go back to her dead city of dream.”

  “Look, Denny!” Lethonee bit her pale lip, as if to control her wrath. “Where Sorainya would have you leap.”

  She pointed down at the black tropic sea. And Lanning saw there the glittering phosphorescent trail that followed a shark’s swift fin. The shock of cold dread had chilled him, and he climbed stiffly back from the rail. For he had touched, or tried to touch, Sorainya’s extended hand. And his fingers had found nothing at all!

  Shuddering, he looked at the slim white girl by the rail. He saw the gleam of tears in her eyes, and the pain that lay burning beneath the proud composure of her face.

  “Forgive me, Lethonee!” he whispered. “I am sorry—very sorry.”

  “You were going, Denny!” Her voice was stricken. “Going—to her.”

  The golden shell had floated against the rail. A warrior queen, regal, erect, Sorainya stood buckling on the golden sword. Her long green eyes flamed balefully.

  “Lanning,” the bugle of her voice pealed cold, “it is written on the tablets of time that we are to be enemies, or—one. And Gyronchi, defended by my fighting slaves, by Glarath and the gyrane, has no fear of you. But Jonbar is defenseless. Remember!”

  One sturdy foot, scarlet-buskinned, touched something at the rim of the yellow shell. And instantly, like a projected image from a screen, she was gone.

  Lanning turned slowly back toward Lethonee. Her face, beneath the band of blue that held her red-glinting hair, was white and stiff with tragedy.

  “Please,” he whispered. “Forgive me.”

  No smile lit her solemn face.

  “Sorainya is beautiful,” her voice came small and flat. “But if you ever yield to her, Denny, it is the end of Jonbar—and of me.”

  Lanning shook his head, dazed with a cold bewilderment.

  “But why?” he demanded. “I don’t understand.”

  The wide violet eyes of Lethonee looked at him for a long time. Once her lip stiffened, quivered, as if she were about to cry. But her voice, when at last she spoke, was grave and quiet.

  “I’ll try to tell you, Denny.” Her face was illuminated, like a shrine, by the shimmer of the jewel in her hands. “The world is a long corridor, from the beginning of existence to the end. Events are groups in a sculptured frieze that runs endlessly along the walls. And time is a lantern carried steadily through the hall, to illuminate the groups one by one. It is the light of awareness, the subjective reality of consciousness.

  “Again and again the corridor branches, for it is the museum of all that is possible. The bearer of the lantern may take one turning, or another. And always, many halls that might have been illuminated with reality are left forever in the dark.

  “My world of Jonbar is one such possible way. It leads through splendid halls, bright vistas that have no limit Gyronchi is another. But it is a barren “track, through narrowing, ugly passages, that comes to a dead and useless end.”

  The wide solemn eye of Lethonee looked at him, over the slumberous flame of the jewel. Lanning tensed and caught his breath, as if a light cold hand, from nowhere, had touched his shoulder.

  “You, Denny Lanning,” she went on, “are destined, for a little time, to carry the lantern. Yours is the choice of reality. Neither I nor Sorainya can come to you, bodily—unless perhaps at the moment of your death. But, through a partial mastery of time, we can each call to you, begging you to carry the lamp into our different halls. Denny—”

  The silver voice caught with emotion.

  “Denny, think well before you choose. For your choice will bring life to one possible world. And it will leave another in the darkness, never to be born.”

  A choking lump had risen in Lanning’s throat. He looked at Lethonee, slim and immaculate and lovely in the jewel’s clear light.

  “Have no doubt—never again,” he whispered huskily. “Because I love you, Lethonee. Just tell me what I must do.

  And tell me if I can ever come to you.”

  Her fine head shook, in the blue halo.

  “Your life has not yet run to the moment of your choice,” she said slowly. “And the event is vague and ambiguous in the mist of possibility.”

  Lanning tried again to touch her arm—in vain.

  “Just remember me, Denny,” she was breathing. “Remember what I have told you. For Sorainya still has her beauty, and Glarath the gyrane’s power. Beware of Gyronchi. And the hour will come. Farewell.”

  Her eyes dropped to the jewel, and her fingers caressed its bright facets. Splintering diamond lances burst from it, and swallowed her in fire. She was gone.

  Shaken with a curious weakness, suddenly aware of complete exhaustion, Lanning caught the rail. His eyes fell to the water, and he saw the glitter of the shark’s black fin, still cruising after the ship.

  Chapter III -The Key to Gyronchi

  His life was a dusky corridor, and the present, a lamp that he carried along it. Dennis Lanning never forgot Lethonee’s figure of speech. Eagerly he looked forward to discovering her again, at some dark turning. But he walked down the hall of years, and looked in vain.

  Nor could he forget Sorainya. Despite revulsion from all the ruthless evil he had sensed in her, despite Lethonee’s warning, he found himself sometimes dreaming of the warrior queen in the splendor of her crimson mail. Found himself even dwelling upon the mysterious menace of Gyronchi, an eagerness mingled with his dread.

  The hall he walked was a corridor of war. An old hatred of injustice set him always against the right of might. War correspondent, flying instructor, pilot, military adviser, he found forlorn causes on four continents.

  He fought with words when he could find no better weapons. Once, waiting for Viennese doctors to persuade an obscure African amoeba to abandon his digestive tract, he wrote a Utopian novel. The Road of Dawn, to picture the world that ought to be.

  Again, in the military prison of a dictator whose war preparations he had exposed, he wrote a historical autobiography in the current style among journalists, in which he tried to show that the world was nearing a decisive conflict between democratic civilization and despotic absolutism.

  In all those years, he had no glimpse of Lethonee. But once, on the field with the native army in Ethiopia, he woke in his tent to hear her grave warning voice still ringing in his ears:

  “Denny, get up and leave your tent.”

  He dressed hastily, and walked out through the camp in the thin bitter wind of dawn. The tent, a few minutes later, was struck by an Italian bomb.

  Sorainya came, once.

  It was a night in Madrid, the next year, where he had gone to join the Loyalist defense. He was sitting alone beside a little table in his hotel room, cleaning and loading his automatic. A queer little shudder passed over him, as if his malaria had come ba
ck from the Chaco and the Jungle War. He looked up, and saw that long shallow shell of yellow metal floating above the carpet.

  Sorainya, in the same shining scarlet mail, looking as if he had seen her five minutes ago, instead of nine years, was lounging on her silken cushions. A bare arm flung back the golden wealth of her hair, and her greenish eyes smiled up at him with a taunting insolence.

  “Well, Denny Lanning.” Her voice was a husky, lingering drawl, and her long eyes studied him with a bold curiosity. “The ghost of Jonbar has guided you safely through the years. But has she brought you happiness?”

  Lanning had grown rigid in his chair. He flushed, swallowed. The sudden white dazzle of her smile caught his breath.

  “I am still the mistress of Gyronchi.” Her voice was a caress. “And still the keys of fate are in our hands, if we but choose to turn them.”

  Her white and indolent arm indicated a space on the silken couch beside her.

  “I have come again, Denny, to take you back with me to the throne of Gyronchi. I can give you half a mighty empire—myself, and all of it. What about it, Denny?”

  Lanning tried to control his breath.

  “Don’t forget, Sorainya,” he muttered. “I saw the shark.”

  She tossed back her head, and her hair fell like a yellow torrent across the colored cushions. And the lure of her smile set a pain to throbbing in his throat.

  “The shark would have killed you, Denny. But you should know that death alone can bring you to me—and to the strong new life the gyrane gives. For our lives were cast far apart in the stream of time. And not all the power of the gyrane can lift you out of the time-stream, living—for then the whole current must be deflected. But the stream has little grasp upon a few dead pounds of clay. I can carry that to Glarath, to be returned to life.”

  She came, with a gliding pantherine movement, to her knees on the cushions. Both hands pushed the flowing gold of her hair behind her red-mailed shoulders. And her bare arms reached out, in wide invitation.

  “Denny, will you come with me tonight?” urged the golden drawl. “The way is in your hand.”

  Trembling, hot with desire, Lanning looked down at his hand. The automatic had slipped in his unconscious fingers, until its muzzle was pointed at his heart. His finger was near the trigger. One little pressure—it would be so like an accident.

  Her indolent voice was seductive music: “Gyronchi is waiting for us, Denny. A world to rule—” The white and gold and crimson of her beauty was a stabbing pain in his heart. His pulse was hammering. His finger curled around the cool steel of the trigger. But sanity remained in one corner of his mind, and out of it spoke a voice like the quiet voice of Lethonee:

  “Remember, Denny Lanning! You carry a light for the world to come.”

  Carefully, he made his quivering fingers snap on the safety, and he laid the gun down beside him on the little table. His voice a breathless rasp, he said: “Try again, Sorainya!”

  The green eyes glittered, and her red lips snarled with rage.

  “I warned you, Denny Lanning!” All the indolence gone, her voice crackled brittle and sharp. “Take the side of that phantom of Jonbar, and you shall perish with her. I sought your strength. But Gyronchi can win without it.” With a tigerish savagery, she whipped out the long golden needle of her sword.

  “When we meet again, guard yourself!” A savage foot stamped down, and she was gone. Those two anachronistic women set many a problem that Lanning could not solve. If they were actual visitors from conflicting possible worlds of futurity, he had no evidence of it save his own tortured memory. Many a weary night, pondering the haunting riddle, he wondered if he were going mad.

  But a package that presently came to him in Spain contained another thin little book from Wilmot McLan, now the holder of many degrees and professor of astrophysics at a western university. Inscribed on the flyleaf, “To Denny, from Wil—a second stitch in time, to repair my last,” the volume was entitled: Probability and Determination.

  One underlined introductory paragraph Lanning searched desperately for a relevant meaning:

  “The future has been held to be as real as the past, the only directional indicator being the constant correlating entropy and probability. But the new quantum mechanics, destroying the absolute function of cause and effect, must likewise annihilate that contention. There is no determination in small scale events, and consequently the ‘certainties’ of the microscopic world are at best merely statistical. Probability, in the unfolding future, must be substituted for determination. The elementary particles of the old physics may be retained, in the new continuum of five dimensions.

  But any consideration of this hyper-space-time continuum must take note of a conflicting infinitude of possible worlds, only one of which, at the intersection of their geodesies with the advancing plane of the present, can ever claim physical reality. It is this new outlook of which we attempt a mathematical examination.”

  Conflicting… possible worlds!

  Those words haunted Lanning. Here, at last, was light. Here, in his old friend, was a possible confidant: the one man who might understand, who might tell him whether Lethonee and Sorainya were miraculous visitors out of time, or—insanity.

  At once he wrote McLan, outlining his story and requesting an opinion. Delayed, doubtless, by the military censors, the letter at last came back from America, stamped: Removed—Left no Address. An inquiry to the university authorities informed him that McLan had resigned to undertake private research. His whereabouts were unknown.

  And Lanning groped his way alone, through the dark hall of wars and years, to 1937. Lao Meng Shan’s cable found him at Lausanne, recuperating from the war in Spain, the splinter of a German shell still aching in his knee. He was writing another book.

  Turned philosopher, he was trying to analyze the trends of the world: to pick out the influences of good and evil,, the resolution of whose conflicting forces, so he believed, would either establish the new technological civilization or hurl the race back into a savage twilight.

  “Denny, my old American friend,” the cable ran, “humanity needs you here. Will you fly for China?”

  Direct action had always been the only anodyne for Lanning’s tortured mind. And the newspapers, that day, stirred his blood with accounts of hundreds of women and children killed by unexpected air raids. Ignoring the stiffening pain in his knee, he laid aside the ancient problem of good and evil, flew to Cairo, and caught a fast steamer east.

  CHAPTER IV - THE SHIP OF THE DEAD

  Winged doom was a whisper in the sky. Sirens moaned warning of the pel chee—the “flying engines.” Frightened Shanghai had been blacked out, but already yellow bursts of ruin and death had flared above Chapei in the north and eastward along the Whangpoo docks, where the first Japanese bombs were falling.

  Limping on his game left leg, where Krupp steel still made an excellent barometer of impending weather, Lanning stumbled across the Lunghwa field, south of the sprawling city, to the battered antique of a plane roaring in the line. The cool of midnight cleared the sleep from his head, and he shuddered to the drumming in the sky.

  Lao Meng Shan, now his gunner, was already beside the machine, dolefully shaking his watch. Solemnly, in his careful English, he shouted above roaring motors:

  “Our commanders are too confident. My watch stopped when the first bomb struck. That is a very bad omen.”

  Lanning never laughed at superstition—few fliers do. But his lean face smiled in the darkness.

  “Once, Shan,” he shouted in reply, “an ancient warrior named Joshua stopped the sun until his battle was won. Maybe that’s the omen. Let’s go.”

  Adjusting his helmet, the Chinese shrugged.

  “I think it means that we shall not come down alive. If it is written, however, that we must die for China—”

  He clambered deliberately into the rear cockpit.

  Lanning tried the controls, signaled the ground crew, and gunned the motor. The time-prov
en machine lifted toward

  the thrumming in the sky. The fact that most of the defending aircraft had been bombed into the ground on the day before, he thought grimly, was a more conclusive omen than the watch.

  Darkness was a blanket on the city, northward, hiding cowering millions. Troop lorries and fire trucks shrieked through the streets. Anti-aircraft batteries were hammering vainly. Probing searchlights flared against the white puffs of exploding shells, uselessly seeking the raiders.

  Spiraling for altitude, Lanning narrowed gray eyes to search a thin cloud-wisp above. He winced to a yellow flare beneath. For his mind saw the toppling wreckage of a splendid modern city ruined, and heard shrieks and groans and wailing cries for aid. He could amost smell the sharp odor of searing human flesh. His thin body tensed, and he fired a burst to warm the guns.

  They were level with the cloud when it burned white, abruptly, in the glare of a searchlight. A dark bomber was slipping out of it, swaying between the gray mushrooms of shells. Lanning tipped the ancient plane into a power dive. Shan waved cheerfully. Their machine guns clattered. The bomber swerved, and defending guns nickered red. But Lanning held his sights on it, grimly. Black smoke erupted from it suddenly, and it toppled earthward.

  One…

  He was pulling up the battered ship, gingerly, when a roving searchlight caught and held them. Black, ominous holes peppered the wings. Glass shattered from the instruments before him. A sudden numbness paralyzed his shoulder.

  The betraying light went on. But gasoline reeked in his nostrils, and a quick banner of yellow flame rippled backward. Twisting in the cockpit, he saw behind them the second enemy, diving out of the cloud, still firing.

  And he saw the dark blood that stained Shan’s drawn face. They were done for. But Shan grinned stiffly, raised , a crimson hand to gesture. Lanning flung the creaking ship through a reckless Immelmann turn. The attacker was caught dead ahead.

  A red sledge of agony smashed all feeling from Lanning’s right leg. But he held straight for the other ship, guns hammering. It dived. With flaming gasoline a roaring curtain beside him, Lanning clung grimly to its tail. The tiny puppets of its crew jerked and slumped. Then it, too, began to burn.