CHAPTER XVI - Rendezvous with Destiny
Lanning lay under the crystal dome. The throb of the atomic converters rang loud on the deck beneath his head. An anvil of agony still rang in his skull, and all his body was an aching, blood-clotted stiffness. But, queerly, the cold pain had ebbed from the sword-thrust in his shoulder.
“Denny?”
It was a voiceless sob from Wil McLan, husky with an urgent pleading. Lanning was surprised that the old man still survived Sorainya’s attack. He struggled to his feet, and found McLan still lying in that darkening, clotting pool.
“Wil! What can I do?”
“The needle in the drawer,” gasped McLan. “Four c.c. Intravenous—”
Lanning stumbled to the control board, found, in the drawer beneath it, a bright hypodermic and a small bottle of heavy lead, marked: Dynatomic Formula L 648. Filled, New York City, August, 1935. The liquid, in the needle, shone with a greenish luminescence. He rolled up McLan’s sleeve, thrust the point into a vein at the elbow, pushed home the little plunger.
He examined the old man’s wound. It had already ceased to bleed. It looked puzzlingly as if it had been healing for days, instead of minutes.
“Thanks,” whispered McLan. “Now yourself—but only two c.c.”
He lay back on the floor, with his eyes closed. Lanning made the injection into his own arm, and felt a quick tide of life running through his veins. His dulled senses cleared. Still he was dead-tired, still his battered head ached; yet he felt a quickening stir of the same strange well-being that he had found once before aboard the Chronion, after the surgeons of Jonbar had brought him back from death. He picked up the rusty little magnet lying on the floor beside Sorainya’s empty armor.
“Do you think—?” he whispered hoarsely. “Can we put it back?”
“If the converter holds out.” McLan pulled himself, feebly, up to the wheel. “Glarath will be guarding the spot, with his ship and the monsters. And you’ll be all alone. I can take you there, but I’m about done for.”
The thrumming of the converter was swifter again, as his broken hands touched keys and dials.
“Sorainya? That tube I broke?” Lanning touched his twisted shoulder. “Wil, what happened to Sorainya?”
The old man turned. Clutching the bright wheel with both gnarled hands to support his weight, he looked at Lanning. The hatred was gone from his haggard eyes; they were dull with an agony of grief.
“Her life was in that silver tube,” he whispered. “I’ve carried it, all these years. But I could never pour it out.”
“Her life?” Horror touched Lanning again. “But nothing touched her, when I broke the tube.”
“She thought she was immortal.” McLan’s voiceless voice was faint and dry with pain. “She failed to discover the hour of her death when she searched her future. Because it was in her past! The year she came to the throne, the Blue Death swept Gyronchi—a plague that came from some mutant virus created accidentally by the breeders of those half-human ants. That’s what killed Sorainya.”
“But—?” Lanning stared at him blankly. “I don’t understand!”
“After I got out of Sorainya’s dungeons, I determined to destroy her,” he sobbed. “I searched her past, with the temporal ray, for a node of probability. I found it, in the year of the Blue Death.
“You see the priests of the gyrane managed to prepare a few shots of effective antitoxin. When Sorainya caught the disease, Glarath rushed to the palace with the last tube of the serum, to save her life. But if the tube had been broken before it reached her, the analyzer revealed, she would have died. So I drove the Chronion back through the temple to the plague year, and carried away the tube.”
“I see!” Lanning nodded slowly, awed. “It was like carrying away the magnet, to destroy Jonbar.”
“Not quite,” pointed out Wil McLan. “The magnet was carried so far into the conflicting future of Gyronchi that its
geodesies were strained and finally snapped at the vital node, so that Jonbar was blotted from the fifth-dimensional sequence.
“But I carried the tube back into Sorainya’s past. The geodesies were never quite broken, and it was still possible for them to loop back to the node. Therefore—so long as the tube was intact—her survival was still possible. But when you spilled the serum, that possibility was obliterated.
“But if—” Lanning stood staring, numbed with a wondering dread. “If Sorainya died as a girl, what about 94 The Legion of Time
Sorainya the queen? The woman that imprisoned you, and haunted me, and fought the legion—did she never exist?” McLan smiled faintly at his bewilderment.
“Remember, we are dealing with probabilities alone. The new physics has banished absolute certainty from the world. Jonbar and Gyronchi, the two Sorainya’s, living and dead, are but conflicting branches of possibility, as yet unfixed in the fifth dimension. The crushing of the tube merely altered the probability factors affecting Sorainya’s possible life.”
A soft gleam of tears was in his hollow eyes. They looked down at the little glistening heap of woven mail, the empty helmet and the golden sword.
“But she was real, to me,” he breathed. “Too real.”
“These wounds?” Lanning demanded suddenly. “How were they made by a woman who didn’t exist?”
“When they were made, her probability did exist,” whispered Wil McLan. “And a lot of atomic power had been spent, through the temporal field, to match our probability to hers. But you’ll notice they’re disappearing now, with a remarkable rapidity.”
His bright hollow eyes lifted to Lanning.
“Just keep in mind, Denny, that the logical laws of causation are still rigid—but only one step removed. The absolute sequence of events, in the fifth dimension, is not parallel with time—although our three-dimensional minds commonly perceive it as so. But that inviolable progression is the unalterable frame of all the universe.”
His gnarled fingers reached out to touch the rusty magnet in Lanning’s hand.
“The march of that progression, higher than time,” his hushed whisper ran on solemnly, “has now forever obliterated Sorainya the queen. The sequence of events has not yet settled the fates of Jonbar and Gyronchi. But still the odds are all with Gyronchi.”
He gripped Lanning’s arm, his thin hand quivering.
“The last play is near,” he breathed. “The hope—the probability—of Jonbar is all in you, Denny. And the outcome will soon be engraved forever in the fifth dimension.”
He turned to grasp the wheel.
And the Chronion ran back down her geodesic track until the dials stood at 5:49 P.M., August 12, 1921. McLan raised his feeble hand in a warning signal, and his whisper quavered down through the speaking tube:
“Ready, Denny! They’ll be waiting.”
Lanning stood peering into the dancing mists of time. As a desperate ruse that might win a precious moment, he had put on Sorainya’s armor. Her black plume waved above his head. He clutched her golden sword—but whatever device had made it project that deadly blue ray was either broken or exhausted. He moistly gripped the rusty magnet, that must be returned to its place in space and time.
His weary brain, as he waited, dully pondered a last paradox: though they had outrun the tune ship of Glarath in the long race backward through the centuries, no possible speed could bring them first to the goal ahead. He gripped the sword, as the throb of the converter stopped, and straightened in the borrowed mail.
And the Chronion flashed out of the blue again, into the lonely hush of that eroded valley in the age-worn Ozarks. Everything was exactly as Lanning had seen it in the shining block of the chronoscope: the idle, tattered boy, following the two lean cows down the rocky slope toward the dilapidated farm, with his gaunt yellow dog roving beside him.
Everything—except that now the great, squarish black mass of the time ship from Gyronchi lay beside the trail, like a battleship aground. Glarath was a tall black pillar on his lofty deck. The ug
ly projectors of the gyrane beam scowled from their ports. Scores of the warrior giants had been disembarked, to make a hideous wall about the spot where the magnet must be placed.
Whistling, the dawdling boy had come within “twenty yards of the spot, but he gave no evidence that he saw either ship or monsters. One of the red-spotted cows, ahead, plodded calmly through an anthropoid monster. And back to Lanning, where he waited to leap from the deck, came McLan’s whispered explanation:
“No, the boy John Barr won’t be aware of us at all—unless we should turn the temporal field upon him. For his life is already almost completely fixed by the advancing progression in the fifth dimension. In terms of his experience, we are no more than the most shadowy phantoms of probability. Travelers backward into time can affect the past only at carefully selected nodes, and then only at the expense of the terrific power required to deflect the probability-inertia of the whole continuum. Glarath and Sorainya spent atomic energy enough to blast continents, just to lift the magnet from John Barr’s path.”
Gripping the magnet and the sword, Lanning flung himself to the ground. He stumbled on a rock, fell to his knees, staggered back to his feet, ran desperately toward the time ship and the armored horde ahead of the loitering boy.
He waved the golden sword, as he ran, in Sorainya’s familiar gesture. Glarath, on his bridge, waved a black-swathed arm to answer—but then, as Lanning’s heavy feet tripped again, with none of Sorainya’s grace, the black priest went rigid with alarm. His great hoarse voice bellowed a command. The wall of giants came to attention, bristling with the crimson and yellow metal. And a thick black tube swung down in its port.
The first blast of atomic radiation struck a rock beside Lanning. The granite exploded. Molten stone spattered the red mail. A hot fragment slapped his cheek with white agony, and blinded him with the smoke of his own flesh burning.
The boy, meantime, had already walked into the unsuspected warrior ranks, and cold desperation caught Lanning’s heart. In a few moments more, John Barr would pick up the pebble instead of the magnet, and settle the fate of two worlds forever.
Strangled with bitter white smoke, Lanning caught a sobbing breath, and sprinted. Another blinding jet of atomic fire fused the soil to a smoking pool of lava, close behind him. He ran on, too close now for the gyrane rays to reach him, but the wall of monsters waited ahead.
Thick crimson guns came level, and a volley battered him. The bullets failed to pierce the woven mail. But the impacts were bruising, staggering blows, and one missile raked his unprotected jaw and neck, beneath the helmet. A sickening pain loosened his muscles. Red gouts splashed down on the crimson mail. He spat broken teeth and blood, and stumbled on.
Insect limbs whirled yellow axes high. He raised Sorainya’s sword, and stumbled on to meet them. For an instant he thought the creatures would yield, in awe of the dead queen’s armor. But when Glarath cracked another command from above, they fell upon him furiously.
Golden blades ripped and battered at his mail. He drove Sorainya’s sword into a shining hard thorax. A clubbed red gun smashed against his extended arm. The bone gave with a brittle snap, and his arm fell useless in the sleeve of mail. He clutched the precious magnet close to his body, and lunged ahead.
Blows rained on him. Something battered the helmet stunningly against his skull. A cleaving axe cut his neck half in two, at the juncture of helmet and mail. Hot blood gushed down inside the shirt, and his limbs went lax.
Yet some old terror of their dead mistress repelled the giants from any actual contact with her armor. So Lanning, even wounded and beaten down, came reeling through their ranks to the hollow square they guarded.
He saw the ragged boy stroll whistling idly through the line of giants, the hungry dog at his heels. He saw the gleam of the pebble, the triangular print in the clay where” the magnet had lain, not two paces from the boy. Another second—
But he was falling. His strength was spurting out in the red stream jetting from his neck. Another merciless blow smashed his shoulder, numbed the arm that held the magnet, crushed him down.
His eyes fogged with pain. But, as he fell, he saw beside him, or thought he did, a splendid figure. A grave majestic head, towering out of a shimmering opalescence. The stranger looked at him, and his body tingled as if a cool unseen something had brushed against him. A calm voice spoke, if only in his mind:
“Courage, Denny Lanning!”
And the man was gone.
Lanning knew that he had been one of the dynon, the remote heirs of Jonbar. His mere glance had somehow eased Landing’s pain, brought life back to his collapsing limbs. But Glarath had bellowed another command. An avalanche of giants fell upon Lanning. And the aimless boy was already stooping for the pebble.
Lanning hurled himself forward, his good arm thrust out with the magnet. A yellow blade hacked through his arm.
Mute monsters crushed him down. But the magnet, flung with the last effort of his fingers, dropped into the triangular print where it belonged.
A bright curiosity—the very light of science—was born in the eyes of the stooping boy. His inquisitive fingers closed on the V of steel. And the acid-reeking creatures piled on Lanning’s body were suddenly gone.
The black ship flickered like a wing of shadow, and vanished.
John Barr picked up the magnet, with a faint whistle of wonder at a rusty nail clinging to it. He went on down the slope, driving his two spotted cows through the unseen hull of the Chronion.
Dennis Lanning was left alone beside the trail. He knew he was dying. But the fading throb of his pain was a triumphant drum. He knew Jonbar had won.
His dimming eyes clung to the Chronion. Hopelessly, he tried to hope that Wil McLan would come before he died. But the time ship shimmered and disappeared. He lay quite alone in the sunset on the hill.
CHAPTER XVII - Worlds that never were
It was a dream, he knew, but Lethonee had been standing beside him. Tall and straight in the same white gown, with the great bright crystal of time cradled in her hands.
“Thank you—thank you, Denny Lanning.” Her low voice had trembled and broken. “I bring you the gratitude of Jonbar, for something no other could have done.”
Lanning struggled against the stiffening cold that had seized his body, and failed to speak a single word. But he saw her violet eyes shining with tears, and heard her sobbing voice:
“Don’t die, Denny! Come back to me, in Jonbar!”
He had fought the cold rigor in him, but he couldn’t answer. And now she was gone, like a fading dream. He knew that he lay dying, on that lonely Ozark hill.
But now there was another dream, even more fantastic. He thought he was once again lying in a clean bed in the little green-walled hospital on the Chronion. The brisk, efficient surgeons of Jonbar had been attending him for a long time, it seemed, in the dim drowsy intervals of sleep. Their wondrous science, he dreamed, had made his body whole again.
It had to be a dream. For Willie Rand was sitting up on the opposite bed, grinning at him with clear, seeing eyes. Willie Rand! who had been slain, blind and alone, in that fantastic hopeless charge against the anthropoid ants, before Sorainya’s diamond throne. He was blowing a smoke ring, watching it happily.
“Howdy, Cap’n Lanning. Cigarette?*’
Numbed with bewilderment, Lanning reached automatically to catch the cigarette. There was no pain in the arm that the giant’s clubbed gun had broken. He tried the fingers again, incredulously, and s-tared across at Willie Rand.
“What’s happened?” he demanded. “I thought you were—were blind and dead. And I was cashing out—”
“Right, cap’n,” Rand exhaled a white cloud, grinning through it. “Reckon we’ve all died twice. But now we’re getting another stack of chips—all but poor old McLan.” . “But—?” Lanning stared at the smoke, as if it had been the blue haze of time. “How—”
But then he heard a clatter on the stair. Barry Halloran and bull-like Emil Schorn came
down from the deck, carrying a stretcher. Two of the surgeons from Jonbar followed, and a third rolled in a- table of instruments. They laid the bandaged figure gently on a bed. Lanning caught the glint of a hypodermic and the glow of the little needles that shone with some healing radiation,
“The little limey, Duff Clark,” Willie Rand was drawling. “Nearly lost him. Went overboard, you know, on the way back, and sort of got mislaid in probability and time. Took days to untangle the Geo—geodesics. Scorched with the gyrane—the same hell-fire that burned out my eyes. But I reckon these medics can tune him up again.”
Lanning was sitting up on the side of his bed, unsteadily at first. Now Barry Halloran discovered him, Barry, alive again! His rugged, freckled face lit with a joyous grin.
“Denny, old man!” He strode to grip Lanning’s hand. “About time you came alive!”
“Tell me, Barry!” Lanning clung to his powerful hand, shuddering to a sudden agony of hope. “How did all this happen? And can we—can we—?” He gulped, and his desperate eyes searched Barry’s broad, cheerful face. “Can we go back to Jonbar?”
A shadow of pain blotted out the smile.
“Wil did it.” Barry Halloran said. “The last thing he did. He left you where you put that magnet, and drove the Chronion back down to Jonbar. Dead when he got there—dead beyond the power of our friends to revive him.”
The big tackle looked away for a moment.
“Wil knew he was going down,” he went on huskily. “He rigged an automatic switch to stop the Chronion when it came to Jonbar. A new crew brought these doctors back, to haul us aboard and resurrect us again. Quite a hunt, I gather, through a snarl of broken geodesies—”
“Lethonee?” whispered Lanning, urgently. “Can we—”
“Ach!” It was a bellow of greeting from Emil Schorn. He smashed Lanning’s fingers in a great ham of a hand. “Ja, Denny! Jonbar iss Valhalla! Where men fight und die—und fight und die again! Und Sorainya—”
The Legion of Time Page 10
