An awed admiration deepened his bellow.
“Der red queen off war! Ach, a Valkyrie! A battle maiden, terrible but beautiful. None like her in Jonbar, nein.” “Jonbar?” Lanning gasped out the question. “Are we going there?”
“Ach, Ja! In our own times, we’re all kaput. But der Herren doktors will find room for us there. We may even fight again, for Jonbar.” His face lit. “Ach, heil, Valhalla!”
Lanning was standing on the deck, aglow once more with the quiet elation of perfect bodily well-being, when the Chronion slipped again from the shifting mists of time, into the clear sky over Jonbar.
Genial sunlight of a calm spring morning lay soft and warm upon the tall silver pylons. Gay-clad multitudes were pouring out across vast green parks and broad viaducts and the terrace gardens of the towers, to greet the Chronion.
The battered little time ship drifted down slowly above them. The men out of the past, radiantly fit, but still, as Barry Halloran remarked, a scarecrow crew in their ragged, faded, oddly assorted uniforms, were gathered at the rail, waving happily.
All the legion, alive again! Schorn and Rand and Duffy Clark, swarthy Cresto and somber Barinin and grinning Lao Meng Shan. The two lean Canadians, Isaac and Israel Enders, side by side. Courtney-Pharr, and Erich von Arneth, and Barry Halloran. And dapper little Jean Querard, perched perilously on the rail, making a speech into space.
But now it was one of the scientists from Jonbar who held the bright wheel under the dome. A great door had opened high in the wall of a familiar-seeming tower. The Chronion nosed through, to settle on her own platform in the great hangar, where a noisy crowd was waiting. Jean Querard strutted and inflated his chest. Teetering on the rail, he waved for silence.
“C’est bon,” his high voice began. “C’est ires bon—”
Trembling with a still incredulous eagerness, Lanning slipped past him, into the crowd. He found the elevator. It flung him upward, and he stepped out into that same terrace garden, where he had dined with Lethonee.
Amid its fragrant, white-flowered shrubbery, he paused for a moment to catch his breath. His eyes fell to the wide green parks that spread to the placid river, a full mile beneath. And he saw a thing that stabbed his heart with a queer little needle of pain.
For this great river, he saw, was the same river that had curved through Gyronchi. Great pylons stood where miserable villages had huddled. The largest of them towered from the very hill that had been topped by the squat black temple of the gyrane.
But where was the other hill, where Sorainya’s red citadel had been?
His breath quivered and caught, when he saw that it was this same hill, that bore the tower of Lethonee. His hands gripped hard on the railing, and he looked down at the little table where he had sat with Lethonee, on the dreadful night of Jonbar’s dissolution. For Sorainya, glorious on her golden shell, rose again to mock him, as she had done that night. Tears dimmed his eyes, and a haunting, sudden ache gripped his pausing heart.
Oh, fair Sorainya … slain!
A light step raced through the sliding door behind the shrubs, and a breathless voice called his name, joyously. Lanning looked up, slowly. And a numbing wonder shook him.
“Denny Lanning!”
Lethonee came running toward him, through the flowers. Her violet eyes were bright with tears, and her face was a white smile of incredulous delight. Lanning moved shuddering to meet her, speechless.
For the golden voice of the warrior queen had mocked him in her cry. And the ghost of Sorainya’s glance glinted green in her shining eyes. She even wore a close-fitted gown of shimmering metallic crimson, that shone like Sorainya’s mail.
She came into his open, trembling arms.
“Denny—” she sobbed happily. “At last we are—one.”
His new world spun. This same hill had carried Sorainya’s citadel. But neither Jonbar nor Gyronchi had ever actually existed. Divergent roads of probability, stemming from the same beginning, they were now fused into the same reality. Lethonee and Sorainya—
“Yes, my darling.” He drew them both against his racing heart, breathing softly, “One!”
The Legion of Time Page 11
