The Legion of Time

by Jack Williamson

  Two…

  But an explosion buffeted Lanning’s head. Metal fragments seared past. Hot oil spattered his seared face. The motor stopped, and a new torturing tongue of yellow licked back.

  Strangling, Lanning sideslipped, so that the wind stream would carry away the heat and suffocating fumes. He looked back at Shan. The crimson face of the little Oriental was now a dreadful mask. With a queer, solemn little grin, he held up something in a dripping hand—his watch.

  A cold shudder went down Lanning’s spine. He had never laughed at superstition. And now this evidence that human intuition could perceive the future seemed as shocking, suddenly, as the close approach of death. A stark incredulity had frozen Shan’s grin, and he pointed stiffly. Lanning’s eyes followed the crimson-streaming arm. And a cold hand stopped his heart. For something was flashing down beside them.

  A queer-looking ship—or the dim gray ghost of a ship. It was wingless, flat-decked—like no ship the sky had ever seen. Its slim hull was like a submarine’s, except that its ends were two massive disks of metal, which now shone greenishly.

  A singular crew lined the rail, along the open deck. At first they seemed spectral and incredible as the ship. Several were strange in odd trim tunics of silver-gray and green. But there were a few in familiar military uniforms: a French colonel, an Austrian lieutenant, a tall lank captain of the Royal Air Force. Lanning’s mouth fell open, and a sudden agony of joy wrenched his sick body.

  For he saw Barry Halloran!

  Unchanged since that fatal April day of ten years ago, even wearing the same baggy cords and football sweater, the gigantic tackle towered above the rest. He saw Lanning, and grinned, and waved an eager greeting.

  The ghostly craft swept closer, dropping beside the burning plane. Suddenly, somehow, it turned more real. Lanning’s pain was drowned in wonderment, and he ceased to breathe. He saw a thin white-haired man—a queer familiar figure—busy beneath the small crystal dome that capped a round metal turret, amidships. A tube like the muzzle of a crystal gun thrust out of the turret. A broad, blinding yellow ray funneled from it, caught the plane, drew.

  Lanning felt a momentary wrenching pull. The plane and his body resisted that surge of mysterious force. Red mighty hands of agony twisted his hurt body. Then something yielded. And the ship became completely real, close beside the flaming plane.

  Agony wrapped Lanning again, as his fingers slipped useless from the stick. He coughed and strangled, slipping down into a sea of suffocating darkness. Searing torture consumed him. Then he was being drawn over the rail of the stranger, out of that hurtling furnace.

  Ghost ship no longer, it was still incredible. Quick, tender hands were laying them on stretchers. But Lanning was staring up at big, red-headed Barry Halloran, magically unchanged by ten years of time.

  “Sure, old man, it’s me!” boomed the once familiar voice. “Just take things easy. These guys will soon fix you up as good as new—or better. And then we’ll have a talk. Guess I’m way behind the times.”

  A phantasmal ship, manned with a crew of the dead. Lanning had not been superstitious; not even, in the conventional sense, religious. His faith had been a belief in the high destiny of man. He had expected death to blot him out, individually; the race alone was eternal. This Stygian craft ship was, therefore, utterly unexpected—but it looked decidedly interesting.

  “Barry!” he whispered. “Glad—see you—” A wave of shadow dimmed his eyes. Blood was welling from his shoulder, hot and sticky against his body. A dull throbbing came from his shattered leg. Dimly, he knew that the men in gray and green were picking up the stretcher. But his awareness flickered out.

  CHAPTER V - THE SHATTERED MAN

  When Dennid Lanning began to be fully conscious again, it seemed that he had always been in that small, green-walled room. ins old restless, rootless life seemed dream-like, somehow remote beyond reality—all save somehow the visitations of Lethonee and Sorainya.

  Dimly he remembered an operating room: blinding lights; bustling men in white masks; the glitter and clink of surgical instruments; Barry Halloran standing by with a grin of encouragement; the first whiff of some strange anaesthetic.

  Shan was lying in the opposite bed, quietly asleep. And Lanning, in some forgotten interval, had met the two others in the ward. They were Silvano Cresto, Spanish ace shot down in the Moroccan war; and Willy Rand, U.S.N. missing when the ill-fated airship Akron was destroyed at sea. The latter was now propped up on his pillows, inhaling through a cigarette. He grinned.

  “Smoke?”

  “Thanks.” Lanning caught the tossed white cylinder, in spite of a dull twinge from his bandaged shoulder. He asked, “What’s up?”

  Willie Rand exhaled white vapor. “Dunno.”

  “What is this—ship? Where’re we going?”

  “Her name’s the Chronion.” Rand blew a great silver ring. “Cap’n Wil McLan. We’re bound, they say, for a place called Jonbar—wherever that is!”

  Wonder stiffened Lanning. Wil McLan! His old roommate, who had been the student of time. Jonbar! Lethonee’s city, that she had showed him, far-off in some dim futurity.

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

  “Nor me. All I know, messmate, I turned loose when the wreckage of the Akron was rolling over on me, and tried to dive clear. Something smashed into me, and I woke up on this bed. Maybe a week ago—”

  “A week!” Lanning stared. “But the Akron—that was back in ‘thirty-three!”

  Rand lit another cigarette from the first.

  “Time don’t make no difference here. The last man on your bed was the Austrian, Erich von Arneth. He came from the Isonzo front, in 1915. The one in the Chink’s bed was the Frenchman, Jean Querard. He was blown up in 1940, fighting to save Paris.”

  “Forty!” Lanning whispered softly. Was tomorrow, then, already real? Lethonee—and Sorainya!

  A brisk man in gray and green hastened into the ward, gently removed the cigarettes and replaced them with odd-looking thermometers. Lanning took the instrument out of his mouth.

  “Where’s Barry?” he demanded. “I want to see Barry Halloran. And Will McLan!”

  “Not now, sir.” The rhythmic accent was curiously familiar—it was like Lethonee’s! “It’s time for your last IV. You’ll be able to get up when you wake. Now just lie back, sir, and give me your arm.”

  He put back the thermometer. Another man rolled in a wheeled instrument table. Deft hands bared and swabbed Lanning’s arm. He felt the sting of a hypodermic. And quiet sleep came over him.

  When at last he woke, it was to a new, delicious sense of health and fitness. The bandages were gone. His shoulder, his shattered leg, felt well and whole again. Even the German steel no longer ached in his knee.

  Shan, he saw, was gone from the opposite bed. In it lay a big man, swathed hi bandages, regarding him with dark, stolid Slavic eyes. A silent orderly came in, thrust a dozen little glowing needles into the Russian’s bandages, and laid Lanning’s old uniform, cleaned and neatly repaired, beside his bed.

  “Boris Barmin,” the orderly informed him. “Soviet rocket-flyer. We picked him up near the pole in ‘forty-seven. Smashed, starved, frozen. Ripe for us. You may go, sir. Captain McLan will see you.”

  Lanning put on the uniform, elated with his new sense of health, and eagerly climbed to the deck of the Chronion. It was seventy feet long, between the polished faces of the great metal disks, and broken only with the turret amidships. Some mechanism throbbed softly below.

  The ship must be moving. But where?

  Looking about for a glimpse of the sun or any landmark, Lanning could see only a curiously flickering blue haze. He went to peer down over the rail. Still there was nothing. The Chronion hung in a featureless blue chasm.

  The dancing shimmer in that azure mist was oddly disturbing. Sometimes, he thought, he could almost see the outline of some far mountain, the glint of waves, the shapes of trees or buildings—incongruous impressions, qu
eerly flat, two-dimensional, piled one upon another. It was like a movie screen, he thought, upon which the frames were being thrown a thousand times too fast, so that the projected image became a dancing blur.

  “Denny, old man!”

  It was a glad shout, and Barry Halloran came to him with an eager step. Lanning gripped his hand, seized his big shoulder. It was good to feel his hard muscles, to see this reckless freckled grin.

  “You’re looking fit, Barry. Not a day older!”

  The blue eyes were wide with awe.

  “Funny business, Denny. It’s ten days since they picked me up, trying to swim away from that smashed crate in the Charles, with both legs broken. But I gather you’ve lived ten years!”

  “What’s ahead of us, Barry?” Lanning asked huskily. “What’s it all about?”

  The big tackle scratched the unkempt tangle of his red hair.

  “Dunno, Denny. Wil has promised us some kind of a scrap to save this place they call Jonbar. But what the odds are, or who we’re going to fight, or how come—I don’t know.”

  “I’m going to find out,” Lanning told him. “Where’s Wil McLan?”

  “On his bridge. Ill show you the way.”

  They met four men in the gray and green, just coming on the deck, carrying two rolled stretchers. Following them was the little group of fighting men in their various uniforms. Lao Meng Shan grinned happily to see Lanning, and introduced the others.

  The Spaniard, Cresto. Willie Rand. The lank British flyer, Courtney-Pharr. Hard-faced Erich von Arneth. Dapper little Jean Querard. And Emil Schorn, a duel-scarred, herculean Prussian, who had been taken from a burning Zeppelin in 1917.

  “Where we go?” Cresto shrugged, white teeth flashing through his dark brown grin. “Quien sabe? Anyhow, amigos, this is better than hell! Verdad?” He laughed.

  “We are fighting men,” rumbled Emil Schorn, grimly smiling. “We go to fight. Ach, that is enough.”

  “Quite a gang, eh?” Barry Halloran led Lanning on, to a small metal door in the turret. Inside, another man in gray and green waited alertly behind a bulky thing like a cannon with a barrel of glass. “You’ll find Wil up under the dome.”

  Lanning climbed metal steps. Standing behind a bright wheel, under the flawless shell of crystal, he came upon a slight, strange little man—or the shattered wreck of a man. His breath sucked in, to the shock of sympathetic pain. For the stranger was hideous with the manifold print of unspeakable agony.

  The hands—restlessly fumbling with an odd little tube of bright-worn silver that hung by a thin chain about his neck—were yellow, bloodless claws, trembling, twisted with pain. His whole thin body was grotesquely stooped and gnarled, as if every bone had been broken on some torture wheel.

  But it was the haggard, livid face, crosshatched with a white net of ridged scars, that chilled Lanning with its horror. Beneath a tangled abundance of loose white hair, it was a stiff, pain-graven mask. Dark, deep-sunken, the eyes were somber wells of agony—and hate.

  Strangely, those dreadful orbs lit with recognition.

  “Denny!” It was an eager whisper, but strangely dry, voiceless.

  The little man limped quickly to meet him, thrust out a trembling hand that was thin and twisted and broken, hideous with scars. His breath was a swift, whistling gasping. Lanning tried to put down the puzzled dread that shook him. He took that frail dry claw of a hand, and tried to smile.

  “Wil?” he whispered. “You are Wil McLan?”

  He choked back the other, fearful question: “What has happened to you, Wil?”

  “Yes, Denny,” hissed that voiceless voice. “But I’ve lived forty years more than you have—ten of them in Sorainya’s torture vaults.”

  Lanning started to that name. And the old man stiffened as he spoke it, with hate glaring again in his hollow eyes—the unquenchable hate, Lanning thought, that must have kept his shattered body alive.

  “I’m old, Denny,” the dry rasping ran on. “I was fifty-three when the Chronion was launched at last on the time stream, in 1960. The ten years in Gyronchi—” The seamed face went white, the whisper sank. “They were a thousand!

  “The last four years, in Jonbar, I’ve been preparing for our campaign.” The shattered body came erect with a tense and desperate energy. “Old!” he rasped again. “But not too old to best Gyronchi!”

  A sudden eager hope had risen in Lanning, above all his wonder and dread.

  “Jonbar?” he whispered. “Then—then have you seen a girl named Lethonee?”

  Desperately, he searched that scarred and tortured face. A painful pulse was throbbing in his throat. The tension of his hope was agony. Was it possible—possible that the “gulf more terrible than death” could now be crossed?

  The broken man nodded, slowly. The stern strength of hate seemed to ebb out of him, and the bleak grimness of his face was lit with a stiff little smile.

  “Yes, Denny,” his whisper came softly. “Indeed I know Lethonee. It is she who set me free from the dungeons of Sorainya. It is for her, and her whole world, that we must fight. Or Gyronchi will—erase them.”

  Lanning caught his breath. Trembling, his fingers touched Wil McLan’s twisted shoulder.

  “Tell me, Wil,” he begged. “This is all a riddle—a crazy, horrible riddle! Where is Jonbar? Can I ever really reach Lethonee? And, Sorainya—” Dread choked him. “What—what did she do to you?”

  “I’ll tell you, Denny—presently.”

  McLan’s hollow eyes flashed to the knobs and levers and complicated dials of an instrument board. Moving with a swift precision that amazed Lanning, his gnarled fingers touched the knobs and levers, spun a polished wheel. He whispered some order into a tube, peered ahead through the crystal dome. An alert, surprising strength moved his shattered frame.

  “Presently,” his hoarse whisper came aside to Lanning. “As soon as this task is done. Watch, if you like.”

  Standing wonderingly behind him, Lanning stared out through the crystalline curve of the dome. The blue, enveloping haze flickered more violently. Bent over a creeping dial, McLan tapped a key. And the blue was gone.

  The Chronion was flying low, over a gray, wave-tossed sea. It was late on a gloomy afternoon, and thick mists veiled the horizon. The little craft shuddered, abruptly, to the crash of mighty guns.

  Lanning looked questioningly at Wil McLan. A twisted arm pointed, silently. And Lanning saw the long gray shapes of battle cruisers loom suddenly out of the haze, rocking as they erupted smoke and flame.

  McLan tapped the keyboard beyond the wheel, and the Chronion slipped forward again. The turret revolved beneath them, and the crystal gun thrust out. Below, the stretcher crews moved alertly to the rail.

  Peering through the fog of battle at the reeling ships, Lanning distinguished the Union Jack, and then, on another vessel, the German imperial standard. Suddenly, breathless with incredulous awe, he fitted this chaotic scene into what he knew of naval history.

  “The Defense and the Warrior!” he gasped. “Attacking the Weisbaden! Is this—Jutland?”

  Wil McLan glanced down at the dial.

  “Yes. This is May 31, 1916. We await the sinking of the Defense”

  Through the haze of acrid smoke, the Chronion slipped nearer the attacking British vessels. Suddenly, then, the German cruiser fleet loomed out of the mist, seeking with a hurricane of fire to cover the stricken Weisbaden. Two terrific salvoes rocked the doomed flagship Defense, and it was lost in a sheet of flame.

  The intermingled battle cruisers of both fleets were still plunging through the clouds of battle, belching smoke and death, as Wil McLan brought the Chronion down where the Defense had vanished. Shattered wreckage Uttered the sea, rushing into a great whirlpool where the flagship had. sunk.

  A long helix burned incandescent hi the crystal gun, and a broad yellow ray poured out into the drifting smoke. His sweater stripped off, Barry Halloran jumped overboard, carrying a rope. He was dragged back, through the ray, towing a limp surv
ivor. Dripping blood and brine, the rescued sailor was laid on a stretcher, rushed below.

  Courmey-Pharr was poised to dive, when the steel prow of the disabled Warspite plunged suddenly out of the blinding smoke. He stumbled fearfully back. Lanning caught his breath. It had run them down!

  But Wil McLan tapped a key, spun the shining wheel. Green radiance lit the great terminal disks. And the battling fleets were swept away into blue flickering twilight. The broken old man sighed with weary relief, and rubbed tiny beads of sweat from his scarred forehead.

  “Well, Denny,” he whispered. “One more man to fight for Jonbar.”

  “Now!” demanded Lanning, breathless. “Can you explain?”

  CHAPTER VI - THE WINDOW INTO TIME

  Leaning back against the instrument panel, Wil McLan pushed back the snow-white shock of his hair. Then, as he still paused, his twisted fingers began tracing the white scars that seamed his face.

  “Please forgive my voice, Denny,” his hoarse whisper came at last. “But once in the dungeon, when I was nearly dead with thirst and begging for anything to drink, Sorainya had molten metal poured down my throat. Not even Lethonee’s doctors can grown new vocal cords. Sorainya’ll pay for that!”

  Hate had flared in the sunken eyes again, and drawn the gnarled body taut. The old man tried to compose himself. He unclenched his hands, and his twisted face tried to smile, and he whispered deliberately:

  “Time was always a challenge to me. When we lived in a simple continuum of four dimensions, with time the fourth, its conquest appeared deceptively simple—through some application, perhaps, of the classical Newtonian dynamics.

  “But Max Planck came along with the quantum theory, de Broglie and Schroedinger with their wave mechanics, Heisenberg with his matrix mechanics. Every new discovery seemed to complicate the structure of the universe —and the problem of time.