The Legion of Time

by Jack Williamson

  “Dynat?” Lanning caught at the term. “I heard Lethonee use that word, and the doctors. What does it mean?”

  “It is the vital scientific power upon which the whole civilization of Jonbar is based,” said McLan. “The slow evolutionary adaptation to the use of its illimitable power is what will give birth to the dynon, the perfect race that may exist—if you win for Jonbar.

  “The dynat is as important to Jonbar as the gyrane is to Gyronchi. But there’s no time for nonessentials now. I’ve outlined the situation, Denny. What about it?”

  The dark hollow eyes searched his face with a probing keenness almost painful.

  “Will you accept the championship of Jonbar—knowing that it is a nearly hopeless battle? Will you set yourself against Sorainya, and give up whatever she may offer?” The hoarse whisper fell. “Remember, Denny, it’s an act of yours that must kill Sorainya—or Lethonee.”

  A cold shudder passed over Dennis Lanning, and a choking ache closed his throat. The serene white image of Lethonee was before him, holding the jewel. But the proud, red-mailed splendor of Sorainya came instantly to push it away. He couldn’t, he thought, endure the death of Lethonee. But could he—even if he would—destroy Sorainya? He gulped, and nodded painfully.

  “Yes, Wil,” he said. “I accept.”

  “Good for you, Denny!” Wil McLan’s broken fingers gripped his hand. “And now I give you command of our legion out of time.”

  “No, Wil,” Lanning protested. “I’ve earned no right to command.”

  “Gyronchi must be destroyed—and even Sorainya.” A bitter light flashed in the hollow eyes again, and the gnarled fingers touched the worn silver tube. “I’ll do my part. But I’ve no knack of leadership. My life has been spent too much with abstractions. You’re a man of action, Denny, and in the crucial place. You must command.”

  “Okay. I’ll do my best.”

  McLan’s scarred hand lifted stiffly to salute him.

  “Thank you, Denny. Now I suggest that you go down and brief your men. You may give them a choice—though it’s a pretty hard one. They may follow your command, or be returned to where we found them.”

  “Which would mean—death?”

  Wil McLan nodded.

  “There is no other place for them in time—alive. If we win, a place can be made for those who survive, probably in Jonbar. If we fail, there is only death again—perhaps in Sorainya’s dungeons.”

  “In Jonbar—” repeated Lanning, huskily. “Can I go there if we win? To Lethonee?”

  “If we win,” the old man told him. “Now, if you will talk to your men, I’ll try to find Jonbar with the chronoscope.” Eagerly, Lanning gasped, “May I—”

  A solemn twinkle flashed briefly in McLan’s hollow eyes.

  “If I get Lethonee,” he promised, “I’ll call you. But it’s very hard to find Jonbar.”

  Lanning went back down through the turret to the deck, and sent Barry Halloran to call the men together. Facing the curiously assorted little group, he told them:

  “Men, I’ve just talked to Captain McLan.” He saw the flash of anxious interest on their faces. “He has gathered us out of time, saved each one of us from certain death. In return, he wants us to fight, to save a future world. I know the cause is good.

  “He has offered me the command. I must ask you either to follow me, or to be returned to your own place in time—to die. I’m sorry the terms are so hard—”

  “Hard?” shouted Barry Halloran.

  “Nein!” grunted Emil Schorn. “Are we craven, to turn back from Valhalla?”

  “Viva!” shouted Cresto. “Viva el capitan!”

  “Thank you,” Lanning gulped. “If we win, there will be a place for us in Jonbar. Now, if you’re all with us, repeat after me: I pledge loyalty to Jonbar, and I promise to serve dutifully in .”

  The seven men, with right hands lifted, shouted the oath, and then, led by Willie Rand, roared out a cheer for “Jonbar and Cap’n Lanning.”

  One of the orderlies beckoned, and Lanning returned hastily to the bridge.

  “Did you—” he began breathlessly. “Did you—”

  Wil McLan shook his haggard head, and pointed to the cabinet of the chronoscope.

  “I tried,” he whispered hoarsely. “But the enemy has moved again. One more triumph of Sorainya is fixed in the fifth dimension. Jonbar is one step nearer extinction. The image nickered, and went out. Now this is all I can get.”

  Looking into the crystal block, Lanning once more saw Gyronchi. But it was strangely changed. Sorainya’s proud citadel, on one hill, had collapsed in a heap of corroded, blackened metal. The black temple of the gyrane, on the other eminence, had crumbled to a tremendous mound of shattered stone. Beneath, upon the denuded wastelands where fields and villages had been, was a desolate untrodden wilderness of weeds and brush, leprously patched with strange scars of white, shining ash.

  “Gyronchi?” breathed Lanning. “Destroyed?”

  “Destroyed,” rasped Wil McLan, “by its own evil. By a final war between Sorainya’s half-human warriors and the priesthood of the gyrane. Mankind, hi the picture you witness, is extinct.”

  His hoarse whisper sank very low.

  “If we fail—if mankind follows the way of Gyronchi—that is the end of the road.” Wearily, he snapped off the switch, and the bleak scene vanished. “And now it seems that the road has been chosen. For no other geodesies remain strong enough for the instrument to trace.”

  His hands knotted impotently, Lanning stared blankly out through the dome, into the haze of flickering blue.

  “What—” he demanded. “What could have happened?”

  “I don’t know.” Wil McLan shook his head. “We must try to find what Sorainya has done, and try to undo it. If we could get back to Jonbar, and Lethonee’s new geodesic laboratory—”

  Lanning gripped his thin shoulder. “Can we?”

  “I’m afraid,” whispered Wil McLan, “that this move has so far undermined the probability of Jonbar that we can never reach it. But we can try!”

  And the broken old hands spun the wheel of the Chronion.

  CHAPTER VIII - THE VANISHING OF JONBAR

  Boris Barinin came up from the hospital ward. Two Canadians followed: lean silent twins named Isaac and Israel Enders, who had been snatched from a shell hole on Vimy Ridge in 1917. With Duffy Clark, the British sailor from Jutland, they made eleven men under Lanning. He organized them into two squads, made Emil Schorn his second in command.

  Wil McLan had been collecting weapons. There were a dozen Mauser rifles, two dozen Luger pistols, four crated machine guns, several boxes of hand grenades, and a hundred thousand rounds of assorted ammunition, that all had come, along with a stock of food and a few medical supplies, from a sinking munitions ship.

  “The first precaution,” McLan told him. “We located a torpedoed ship, when we first came back from Jonbar, to collect supplies and arms—and test our technique of recovery. Weapons from Jonbar, you see, wouldn’t function against targets from Gyronchi.”

  Since McLan’s helpers from Jonbar would be unable to enter Gyronchi, Lanning detailed Clark, Barinin, and Willie Rand as a crew for the Chronion, and himself learned something of her navigation, as the time ship drove steadily down the geodesies of Jonbar. The hydrogen converter throbbed endlessly beneath the deck, but Wil McLan seemed disheartened with their progress.

  “The world we seek is now all but impossible,” he rasped. “The full power of the field drives us forward very slowly. And at any instant the geodesies of Jonbar may break, for they are weak enough already, and leave us—nowhere!”

  Once, in his tiny cabin, aft, Lanning woke in his bunk with a clear memory of Lethonee. Slim and tall in her long white robe, she had stood before him, holding the flaming jewel of time. Despair was a shadow on her face, and her violet eyes were dark pools of pain.

  “Denny,” her urgent words rang clear in his memory, “come to Jonbar—or we are dead.”

  Lan
ning went at once to the bridge, and told McLan. The old man shook his white head, grimly.

  “We are already doing all that can be done,” he said. “The geodesies of Jonbar are like microscopic wires drawn out thinner and thinner by the attenuation of probability. If the tracer loses them, or if they snap, Jonbar is—lost!”

  Two weeks passed, by the time of the ship—physiological time, as measured by heartbeats and all bodily rhythms, in which life ran on toward its end, regardless of motion backward or forward along the time dimension. And at last the Chronion slipped silently out of the blue, shimmering abyss. Lanning, waiting eagerly on the deck, saw beneath them—Jonbar!

  The ship was two miles high. Yet, that metropolis of futurity stretched out in every direction as far as he could see. Mirror-faced with polished metal, the soaring buildings seemed more inspiring than cathedrals. With a pleasing lack of regularity, they stood far apart all across the green park-like valley of a broad placid river, and crowned the wooded hills beyond. Many-leveled traffic viaducts flowed among them, busy with strange vehicles. Great silver teardrops came and went through the air about them.

  Lanning had glimpsed the city once before, through Lethonee’s time jewel; now its staggering vastness touched him with a troubled awe. Hundreds of millions, he knew, lived here in this heart-lifting splendor. Yet all the wonder of this world, the cruel fact came home to him like a stabbing blade, faced absolute annihilation.

  Trembling with eagerness and dread, he hurried up to Wil McLan.

  “So Jonbar’s safe?” he whispered breathlessly. “And Lethonee is here?”

  The bent old man turned solemnly from the polished wheel, and shook his scarred white head.

  “We’re here,” came his voiceless answer. “But our instruments show how its geodesies have faded out. It hangs by a strand weaker than a spider’s web. But Lethonee will doubtless be at her new laboratory.”

  The Chronion was gliding swiftly to one tall silver spire on a hill. A vast doorway slid open in a silvery wall. The little ship floated into an immense hangar-like space, crowded with streamlined craft. A green light beckoned them to an empty platform.

  “This is the world we’re fighting for,” Lanning told the men.

  “Ach!” rumbled Emil Schorn. “A good world.”

  Leaving the scarred Prussian in command, and warning him to be ready for instant action in case of emergency, Lanning and McLan left the ship. An elevator in a great pillar shot them upward. They emerged into cool open air, amid the fragrant greenery of a terrace garden. A sliding door opened in a bright wall beyond. Out of it came Lethonee.

  Instead of the long white robe in which Lanning had always seen her, she wore a close-fitting dress of softly shimmering, metallic blue; and a blue band held her hair. Something of the grave solemnity of the apparitions was gone. She was just a lovely human girl, joyously eager to see him—and trying, he thought, to hide a tragic despair.

  She came quickly to him, through the bright garden, and took both his hands in an eager grasp. And Lanning felt a queer little shiver of joy at the warm reality of her touch.

  “Denny Lanning!” she whispered. “At last you have come. I am so glad—”

  Her weary, troubled eyes went to scarred old Wil McLan.

  “Gyronchi has carried out some new attack,” she told him. “The dynon tried to bring a warning from the future, but they were cut off. Now the time crystal shows no future at all, beyond tonight. This is the last possible night for Jonbar. Unless—”

  Her haunted eyes clung desperately to Lanning’s face.

  “Unless the tide of probability is changed.”

  “I’m going to the laboratory.” Wil McLan turned toward the sliding door. “I’ll send for you, Denny,” he whispered, “if we discover anything. But you can do nothing until—unless—we find what Sorainya has done.”

  He limped away, and Lanning was left alone with Lethonee.

  “How can you be—not real?” Lanning stood gazing at her quiet loveliness, framed against the terrace garden. “What’s the difference between reality and—such a seeming as you are?”

  She hesitated, with a little frown of thought.

  “There is a flow from probability to certainty, along the fifth dimension,” she explained. “Probabilities are infinite, but there is only one reality. Many conflicting futures are possible, but the past is simple and complete! The geodesies branch at each point of uncertainty, but the flow of realization must always take one branch and obliterate the rest. All the geodesies tend to absorb energy; all possible worlds strive for reality. But the energy of probability must always be withdrawn again from all those other worlds that might have been, to create the single one that can be. All the rest must vanish, as their probability fades to zero.”

  “And Jonbar is—vanishing?”

  She nodded. “It—and I. We were given creation by the atomic power of the Chronion, bringing you down the geodesies. We are only an illusion of possibility, the reflection of what may be—a reflection that is doomed.”

  Abruptly, then—and Lanning knew that it took a desperate effort—she tossed her lovely head, and smiled.

  “But need illusions talk of illusion?” Her voice was almost gay. “Aren’t you hungry, Denny? Gather flowers for the table. Let’s dine—on illusion!”

  With her own hands she set a little table against the terrace rail. Beyond the rail, a mile below, lay green parklands. Other silver pylons shimmered on distant hills. The genial sun shone from a serene sky, of a blue clarity that Lanning had never seen above a city, and the clean wind whispered in a silence of strange peace.

  “Nothing can happen to you, or to Jonbar!” Lanning whispered suddenly. “Perfection can’t die!”

  “But it can.” Her voice shuddered. “When the whole structure of space-time is shattered with war—it can.”

  Lanning caught her hand.

  “Lethonee,” he said huskily, “for ten years, since the first night you came, I have lived in hope of finding you. Now, if anything should take you—”

  “Remember, Denny.” She moved closer, shivering. “This is the last night of Jonbar. The time crystal shows no tomorrow.”

  The blue dusk turned to mauve and to purple-black. The far towers of Jonbar shone like pillars of fire. Shadows filled the terrace. Some night-blooming shrub sent out a flood of intoxicating sweetness. Slow music came softly from somewhere below. Close to Lethonee, Lanning tried—and failed—to forget the darker shadow of extinction upon her. Suddenly her hand stiffened in his, and she caught a gasping, frightened breath.

  “Greeting!” rang out a voice of golden mockery, “Queen of Nothingness!”

  Lanning looked up, startled. He saw Sorainya’s golden shell. She stood upright in it, proudly erect in her woven scarlet mail. Beside her stood a tall, angular man, gaunt-faced, with dark sullen eyes and cruel heavy lips, robed to his feet in dull stiff black. Glarath, that would be, Lanning knew, high priest of the gyrane. His sunken black eyes smouldered malevolently, but Sorainya’s greenish glance held a mocking amusement.

  “Best taste her kisses while you may, Denny Lanning,” she taunted. “For we have found a higher crucial factor. I didn’t need you, Denny Lanning, after all—Glarath, with the gyrane, has taken the place I once offered you. And now our struggle is won.”

  The black-haired hand of the priest clutched possessively at her strong bare arm. He snarled some guttural, unintelligible word, and his dark eyes burned at Lanning, slitted with hate. Sorainya whipped out the thin golden needle of her sword, and drew it in a flashing arc above the dark city. And she leaned into the black priest’s arms.

  “Farewell, Denny Lanning,” she called. “And take warning! All Jonbar—and the phantom in your arms—will be gone like fog before the wind. We’ve come to watch the end.”

  She touched the sword to her red mouth and then flung it toward him, as if to toss him a derisive kiss. Her feet touched some control, and the shell soared upward and vanished in the night.
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br />   White-faced, shaken, Lethonee was on her feet.

  “Come into the laboratory!” Her voice was dry with dread. “Though I’m afraid—afraid that everything has failed.”

  Lanning followed her to the sliding door. Beyond it he saw a vast tower room. At endless tables, hundreds of men and women were busy with what he took for mathematical instruments. Others, in a far wing beyond, stood peering into scores of huge crystals like Lethonee’s jewel of time. They were still in the doorway when Lanning saw Wil McLan, coming to meet them at a frantic, limping run.

  “Back, Denny!” the old man was screaming, voicelessly. “Get back aboard. Jonbar is—going!”

  Lanning swept Lethonee with him into the elevator. McLan tumbled after them. The cage dropped toward the hangar. Lanning held the girl hard against him.

  “Darling—” he whispered. “You are coming with us!”

  “No, Denny.” She shook her head. “I am part of Jonbar.”

  She clung to him, desperately. He kissed her.

  The elevator stopped. Lanning caught Lethonee’s hand, and started running with her toward the Chronion. Ahead, a welcoming throng of gay-clad people were still gathered about the time ship, tossing flowers to the deck. Dapper Jean Querard stood by the rail, making a speech.

  But a curious pale light had begun to shine from the crowd and the teardrop ships and the lofty walls, as if they were beginning to dissolve into luminous mist. Only the Chronion remained substantial. Lanning sprinted.

  “Hurry!” he sobbed. “Darling—”

  But Lethonee’s fingers were gone from his hand. He stopped, and saw her still beside him—but dim as a ghost. Frantically, her shadow beckoned him to go on. He tried to catch her up in his arms, but she faded from his grasp. She was gone.

  McLan had passed him. Lanning caught a sobbing breath, and fought a blinding pain, and stumbled on. But what was the use, his bitter agony demanded, if Lethonee was gone?