The Legion of Time

by Jack Williamson

  It was huge and windowless. Concealed lights sprang on, as they descended, to show Sorainya’s treasure. Great shimmering stacks of silver and golden ingots, immense mysterious coffers, great slabs of unworked synthetic crystal, sapphire, emerald, ruby, diamond. Statuary, paintings, strange mechanisms and instruments, tapestries, books and manuscripts—all the precious relics of her dynasty. Most curious of all, a long row of tall crystal blocks, in which, like flies in amber, were embedded oddly life-like human forms—the armored originals of the golden colossi above. This was not only the treasury but the mausoleum of Gyronchi’s rulers.

  “Ye gods!” murmured Barry Halloran, blinking, “The old girl’s one collector! This junk is worth—worth more money than there is! King Midas would turn green!”

  Lanning’s jaw went white.

  “I saw her once—collecting!” he whispered bitterly.

  The dropping platform touched the floor.

  “We’re looking for a little black brick,” Lanning said, swiftly. “Something covered with a black cement, to hide it from our search ray.” Shuddering to a trapped feeling, he looked back up at the door. “Better keep moving. We’ve been a long time, and that gong would wake the dead. Sorainya’ll soon be boiling in, with reinforcements.”

  They began a frantic search for the small black brick, breaking open coffers of jewels, shaking out chests of silks and furs. It was Barry Halloran who found the little ebon rectangle, in a cracked pottery jar that lay as if discarded in a dusty corner.

  “That’s it!” Lanning gasped. “Let’s get out!”

  They stepped back upon the platform. Lanning tapped a button on the floor beside it, and it lifted silently. His red hands trembling with wondering awe, Halloran handed the heavy little brick to Lanning.

  “What could it be?” he whispered.

  “Dunno,” Lanning shook his battered head. “But listen!”

  They were rising back into the queen’s bedchamber. He heard a distant clang like the closing of a metal gate, a far tinkle of weapons, and the clear tiny peal of a woman’s anger-heightened voice. His strength went out, and cold dread ached in every bone.

  “Sorainya!” he sobbed. “She’s coming back!”

  They scrambled up to the floor, and ran desperately back through the empty glitter of the vast apartments, the way they had come. They passed the black hangings. Once more they came into the enormous hall of the golden colossi. Again they ran beneath the sighing gong beside the high diamond throne. And there, under the moaning disk, they halted in cold despair.

  For a new horde of Sorainya’s giants, still tiny in the distance, were pouring into the hall. Running gracefully to lead them, flashing in her red-mailed splendor, came the warrior queen herself. Lanning turned to look at Barry’s stricken face. Wearily, he shook his head.

  “She has cut us off!” he breathed. “There’s no way out—”

  CHAPTER XII - The Secret of The Brick

  Lanning’s red fingers closed hard on the heavy black brick, the precious cornerstone of Jonbar. “Fine!” he gasped. “There’s time enough to get—her!”

  Yet, as soon as Barry raised the Mauser, he was sorry he had spoken. For the queen of Gyronchi, in her black-plumed splendor, was too lovely to be slain. Demon-queen! He bit his lip, and quenched a frantic impulse to snatch the rifle down.

  The gun crashed. Lanning waited, with a stricken heart, to see Sorainya fall. But it was one of her insectile soldiers that staggered and clutched with four queer limbs at its hard black shell.

  “I had it on her,” muttered Halloran. “But they’d get us just the same. And she’s so—beautiful.”

  Lanning swayed. The anvil of agony rang louder in his brain. He groped foggily for any possible way back to the ship, but there was none. And Wil McLan’s tormented question was rasping his ears. Could any man kill Sorainya?

  But she must be destroyed, so McLan had said. And Lethonee had told him, long ago, that he himself must choose one of the two, and so doom the other. His heart came up in his throat, and he reached out a trembling hand.

  “Give me—”

  But the rifle had snapped, empty. Halloran flung it down, folded his crimsoned arms, stood waiting grimly. Lanning bent to pick up the gun, gasping, “Don’t let ‘em take us—”

  But Sorainya had paused to level the yellow needle of her sword, which was more than a sword. A hot blue spark hissed to the rifle. Lanning’s hand jerked away from the half-fused weapon, burned and paralyzed. The triumphant bugle of her voice pealed down the hall.

  “Well, Denny Lanning! So you have chosen my dungeons to my throne?”

  Lanning blinked. Sorainya and her charging horde v/ere already halfway down the hall. Beneath her crested helmet, he could see her face still white with vengeful anger, the long green eyes cold as ice. But something came between.

  A shadow. A thickening silver veil. The shadow grew abruptly real. Breathless, Lanning rubbed at his eyes, shuddering to the shock of incredulous hope. It was the Chronion!

  The green glow fading slowly from her polar disks, the time ship landed on the floor before the throne. Lao Meng Shan, on the foredeck, turned the Maxim mounted there toward Sorainya and her creatures—and then fell desperately to taking the gun apart, for it was jammed.

  The thin twisted figure of Wil McLan, under his crystal dome, was beckoning urgently. After that first stunned instant, Lanning caught Barry’s arm, and they ran frantically to climb aboard.

  Sorainya screamed a battle cry. With a flashing sweep of her golden sword, she led her black giants on. A scattering volley from their heavy guns peppered the Chronion. But the turret was turning beneath the dome. The yellow ray flamed upon Lanning and Halloran from the crystal gun, to pull them to the ship.

  Lanning had giimpsed the Wind, bewildered navy airman, Willie Rand, stark and alone on the deck. But, when he and Halloran tumbled breathless over the rail, where Shan still bent over the useless Maxim, Rand was gone.

  “Look, Denny!” Barry Halloran was shouting, hoarse with an awed admiration. “The damn blind fool!”

  He pointed toward Sorainya’s horde, and Lanning saw Willie Rand going to meet them. Bandaged head bent low, he moved at a blind, stumbling run. The broken Mauser was level in his hands, the whetted bayonet gleaming.

  The black warriors paused before that solitary charge, as if bewildered. Sorainya’s fierce shout urged them on. Their guns rattled, and the sailor staggered. But he ran on.

  Lanning stumbled to the speaking tube.

  “Wil!” he gasped. “Can we help?”

  “No.” Wil McLan, under the dome, shook his head. “But it’s what he wanted. Useless—but grand!”

  Even Sorainya had halted. Her golden needle spat blue fire. Willie Rand lurched. His clothing began to smoke. But still he lurched on, to” meet the yellow axes lifted. Lanning had dropped on his knees, to help with the jammed gun. But he saw Rand come to Sorainya’s ranks. He saw the flashing bayonet, as if guided by some extrasensory vision, drive deep into a black thorax.

  The golden axes fell—

  But Wil McLan, on his bridge, had spun his shining wheel, and the Chronion was gone from Sorainya’s hall, back into the blue shimmering gulf of her own timeless track. Lanning reeled through the turret, where Duffy Clark was now on duty behind the crystal gun, and up to join Wil McLan in the dome. The old man seized his arm, desperately.

  “Denny? You got it?”

  “Yes. But how’d you happen to meet us? And where’s Barinin?”

  “They found us on the ledge,” breathed the voiceless man. “Turned down a gyrane ray, from the battlements. Barinin was caught at the gun. Crisped!” He shuddered.

  “We had to take off. I drove on into the future, to avoid their time ship. I was afraid to enter the fortress with the ship—when we couldn’t explore it with the search beam, there was too much danger of collision with some solid object, with very disastrous results.

  “But nothing else was left. We had to take the risk—and we w
on.” He mopped sweat from his scar-seamed face.

  “That hall was the largest room. From my plans, and a study of the ruins in futurity, I approximated its position. And we came back to where it had been.

  “But—the object you recovered?”

  Lanning handed him the glazed black brick.

  “Open it up,” the old man rasped. “We’ve got to discover where Glarath and Sorainya found it, hi time and space, and replace it there.”

  Lanning lifted his eyes from the little block that was the foundation of all Jonbar. Anxiously, he caught at McLan’s twisted arm. “Do you think—? Will they follow?”

  “Of course they’ll follow.” McLan’s hollow eyes glazed with dread. ““This means life and death to them. And they have their own time ship. If they fail to overtake us on the way, they will surely be waiting where the object must be placed. They know the spot.” He returned the brick to Lanning. “See if you can break it open.”

  The block was glass-hard. Lanning tapped at it vainly, broke his pocket knife on it, then carried it down to the deck. It yielded at last to hack saw, chisel, and sledge. It proved to be a thick-walled box, packed with white fiber.

  His quivering fingers lifted the packings to uncover a thick, V-shaped piece of rusty iron.

  His vague, wild expectations had been all of something spectacular: perhaps some impressive document of state upon which history should have turned, or the martyr’s weapon that might have asassinated some enemy of progress. Sick with disappointment, he carried the thing back to Wil McLan.

  “Just a piece of scrap iron,” he said. “A rusty old magnet, out of the magneto of a Model T. And we spent all those lives to find it!”

  “No matter what it is,” the old man whispered. “It was important enough, when Sorainya wrenched it out of the past, to deflect the whole direction of probability—to break the last geodesies of Jonbar.

  “Now, with the chronoscope, I must try to find where it belongs. Then we must put it back—if Sorainya allows us!”

  He looked up at Lanning. “But you’re all in, Denny. You’ve been hurt.”

  Lanning had hardly been conscious of fatigue. Even the ring and throb of pain in the back of his brain had become endurable, a vague and distant phenomenon that did not greatly matter. He felt a great surprise, now, when the dome went black and he knew that he was falling to the floor.

  CHAPTER XIII - Seed of Futurity

  Lanning woke, with his head bandaged, lying in the little green-walled hospital. Barry Holloran grinned at him from the opposite bed. The little cockney, Duffy Clark, came presently with a covered tray.

  “Cap’n McLan?” he drawled. “Why, ‘e’s lookin’ inter ‘is bloomin’ gadgets, tryin’ to find where that she-devil and ”er blarsted hants got ‘old of that magnet.”

  “Any luck?” demanded Lanning.

  “Not yet, sir.” He shook a tousled head. “Wot with hall spayce and time to search for the spot. And the woman an’ her blarsted ‘igh priest is arfter us, sir, in a black ship full of the bloomin’ hants!”

  “But we can outrun them!” Barry Halloran broke in. “We can give ‘em all they want.”

  “Hi dunno, sir!” Clark shook his head. “We’re going hall out. And still they’re ‘olding us, neck and neck.”

  A leaden lethargy still weighed Lanning down. He ate a little, and slept again. Many hours of the ship’s time must have

  passed when he suddenly woke, aware of another sound above the accelerated throb of the hydrogen converter—the Maxim hammering.

  He tumbled out of bed, with Barry Halloran after him, and ran to the deck. The firing had already stopped. The Chronion was once more thrumming alone through the flickering blue abyss. But little Duffy Clark lay beside the gun, smoking and still, his body half consumed by the gyrane ray.

  Shuddering, Lanning climbed into the dome.

  “They caught us,” sobbed Wil McLan. “They’ll catch us again. The converter’s overdriven. As the grids are consumed, they lose efficiency. Clark’s gone. That leaves four.”

  “Did you find—anything?”

  The old man nodded, and Lanning listened breathlessly.

  “The time is an afternoon in August of the year 1921,” whispered Wil McLan. “The broken geodesies of Jonbar had already given us a clue to that. Now I have found the place, with the search beam.”

  Lanning gripped his arm. “Where?”

  “It’s a little valley in the Ozarks of Arkansas. I’ll show you the decisive scene.”

  McLan limped to the metal cabinet of the geodesic analyzer. His broken fingers set its dials. A greenish luminescence filled the crystal block, and cleared. Lanning bent forward eagerly, looking into that strange window of probability.

  An eroded farm, folded in the low and ancient hills. A sagging paintless shack, a broken window gaping and the roof inadequately patched with rusty tin. A rocky cow pasture, its steep slopes scantily covered with useless brush. A small freckled boy in faded overalls and a big ragged straw hat, trudging slowly barefoot down the slope, accompanied by a gaunt yellow dog, driving two lean red-spotted cows home to the milking pen,

  “Watch him,” whispered Wil McLan urgently.

  As Lanning watched, the boy stopped to encourage his dog digging furiously after a rabbit. He squatted to observe a colony of ants. He ran to catch a gaudy butterfly, and carefully dissected it with a broken pocket knife. He rose unwillingly to answer the calls of a slatternly woman from the house below, and ambled after the cows again. Wil McLan’s gnarled fingers closed on Lanning’s arm, urgently.

  “Now!”

  The boy paused over something beside a sumac bush, and stopped to pick it up. The object blurred oddly in the crystal screen, so that Lanning could not distinguish it. The scene was erased, as Wil McLan snapped off the mechanism.

  “Well?” Lanning turned to him, in bewilderment. “What has that to do with Jonbar?”

  “That is John Barr,” said the voiceless man. “For that metropolis of future possibility will be—or may be—named for him. He is twelve years old in 1921, barefoot son of a tenant farmer. You saw him at the turning point of his life—and the life of the world.”

  “But I don’t understand!”

  “The geodesies diverge from the thing he stoops to pick up,” whispered Wil McLan. “It is either the magnet that we recovered from Sorainya’s citadel—or else only an oddly colored pebble that lies beside it. That small choice—which Sorainya sought to decide by removing the magnet—determines which one of two possible John Barrs is to be ultimately established in reality.”

  “Just a scrap of iron,” Lanning said.

  “The seed of Jonbar,” answered McLan. “If he picks up the discarded magnet, he’ll discover the mysterious attraction it has for the blade of his knife, and the strange north-seeking power of its poles. He’ll wonder, experiment, theorize.

  His curiosity will deepen. The scientist will be born in him.

  “He’ll study, borrow books from the teacher at the one-room school in the hollow. He’ll presently leave the farm, running away from a domineering father who sneers at ‘book larnin’,’ to work his way through college. He’ll become a teacher of science hi country schools, an amateur experimenter.

  “Sometimes the flame will burn low in him, inspiration forgotten in the drudgery of life. He’ll marry and raise two children. But his old thirst for knowledge will never be quite extinguished. Finally, at the age of fifty-five, he’ll run away again—this tune from a domineering wife and an obnoxious son-in-law—to carry on his research.

  “A bald, plump little man, mild-mannered, dreamy, impractical, he’ll work for years alone in a little cottage in the Ozarks. Every possible cent will go for the makeshift apparatus. He’ll often go hungry. Once a neighbor will find him starving, nearly dead of influenza.

  “But at last, in 1980, a tired but triumphant little man of seventy-one, he’ll publish his great discovery. The dynatomic tensors—soon shortened to dynat. A totally new la
w of nature, linking life and mind to atomic probability. I had stumbled on one phase of it, with the hydrogen converter. But his tensors will open up a tremendous new technology for the direct release of atomic energy, under full control of the human will.

  “Given freely to the world, the new science of the dynat will create a whole new civilization—although John Barr himself, always too busy to wait for material success, will be quietly buried that same year beside a little church in the Ozarks. The illimitable power of atoms fully tamed will become the life-blood of Jonbar.

  “Nor is that all. Humanity will soar on the wings of this most magnificent slave. The dynat will bring a new contact of mind and matter, new senses, new capabilities. Gradually, as time goes on, mankind will become adapted to the full use of the dynat”

  The whisper was hoarse with a breathless awe.

  “And at last a new race will arise, calling themselves the dynon. The splendid children of John Barr’s old discovery, they will possess faculties and powers that we can hardly dream of—”

  “Wait!” Lanning broke hi. “I’ve seen the dynon! When Lethonee first came, so long ago, to my room in Cambridge, she showed me New Jonbar in her time crystal. A city of majestic shining pylons. And, flying above them, a glorious people, clad, it seemed, in pure fire!”

  Hollow eyes shining, Wil McLan nodded solemnly.

  “I, too, have looked into New Jonbar,” he whispered. “I have seen the promised glory beyond: the triumphant flight of the dynon, from star to star, forever. In that direction, there was no ending to the story of mankind.

  “But in the other—”

  His white head shook. There was silence under the dome. Lanning could hear the swiftened throb of the converter, driving them back through the giddy blue shimmer of possibility toward the quiet scene in the Ozarks they had watched in the crystal block. He saw Lao Meng Shan cleaning the Maxim on the deck below; and Barry Halloran, rifle ready, peering alertly into the flickering abyss.