The Time Axis

by Henry Kuttner

  There was no fading. Instead a second shock followed close upon the first, then another and another – wave after rising wave, tide upon tide of devouring violence. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I was too sick and shaken with the overloading of my nerves, the staggering blows of sensation that battered me. I could not think or reason. I only knew that this time I was lost, drowned in the bursting violence.

  It would not cease. It would never cease. It would go on forever ...

  I saw the shadow of violence fade from a face. Across what seemed to be wide distances I saw the reflection of unimaginable violence ebb. Yes – the mind behind that face had known the staggering onrush of inhuman tides as deeply as my own.

  In the control room of the great steel cylinder Paynter met my gaze – and I read sick horror in his eyes.

  I could not move. Every nerve in my body felt burned out, short-circuited. I could see and hear a little; that was all. I saw Belem clambering up into the hollow side of the huge piston.

  In a moment he appeared behind Paynter. Paynter, I thought, tried to move. His stare broke away from mine. But the Mechandroid's hands darted out, touching Paynter's neck, his head, his spine. Belem spoke a word and took Paynter's shoulder as the latter rose.

  Belem's quicksilver eyes were no longer within my mind, I realized.

  But I wasn't thinking clearly. I had forgotten the armored soldiers.

  Now I saw them. They were quite dead, all of them. I saw how they had died. I remembered the chain of bursting explosions as the killing shadow had swept down from above.

  It was gone now – but it had fed well.

  Belem and the silent obedient figure of Paynter came toward me. I felt the Mechandroid's fingers reach out and probe deeply into my flesh. There was brief pain, then I could move again. But I still could not think very clearly. Belem seemed to be listening to a voice I couldn't hear, He said, as if to himself, "There isn't much time – " and urged both of us forward. Now that I turned, I could see that the matter-transmission chamber at the other end of the room was empty. The crowding Mechandroids with their slowly waking Sleeper had gone. They had stepped, in so many instants, from this place to some other planet that might be anywhere at all in the immeasurable vastness of the Galaxy.

  "Come," Belem said and we moved toward the matter-transmitter.

  The rusted metal walls shimmered around us, faded, vanished.

  Across the depths of space the atoms that made us up dispersed, drew out, reintegrated again. Bright alloy plates shimmered into being. We had stepped again from one world to another.

  Belem pushed the panel open. We stepped out – into a cavern of dusty rock.

  On the floor at our feet a little glittering tree stood motionless, beside it a flat metal sheet with wire bars. Belem sighed with satisfaction.

  "I didn't think they could do it," he said. "Word went out to one of us in the laboratories to get these things replaced but I didn't really think – well, there just isn't much time. Cortland, bring Paynter here, please."

  I obeyed, moving in a curious dreamlike state, the aftermath perhaps of that monstrous rapport with the slaying shadow. Belem was kneeling beside the barred device dial Dr. Essen had used to create the vibratory matrix that had isolated us from space.

  "Useless," he said. "As I half suspected." I looked up at the enclosing walls of stone, beyond which my own home planet stretched. It was curiously comforting to know that the rock overhead and the rock underfoot were the native structure of Earth. Here, on this uneven floor, my own body had fallen to dust.

  I wondered if the drifts in which our feet left prints had once been –

  "This is the cave of the time-axis, then," I said slowly. "And it's no good. Not if you can't work the machine Dr. Essen used. Is it too complicated even for you, Belem? I should have thought – "

  "That isn't the problem. It's comparatively simple, really. The trouble amounts to personalized mental mutation. We could understand how a thing as simple as a Neanderthaler's battle hammer worked but we couldn't use it – we don't have the same muscular training and balance. And mental habits are far more subtle.

  "An invention, in practical application, fits its age and the people of that age. By studying this apparatus, I could work back to the basic principle and construct something similar that would operate in my hands. But only Dr. Essen could use the device that's so completely hers. In effect it's an extension of her mind. And we're in a hurry. I've had to make other plans."

  He glanced toward the closed panel of the transmitter and before he had finished speaking, it began to open. I think there was some mental warning which Mechandroids could exchange over considerable distances. Belem put a restraining hand on my arm as a second Mechandroid stepped into the cavern. He came directly from some world of dust and wind, for his hair was wildly blown and a reddish dust shook from his garments as he moved. He carried very carefully in both hands a milky-white crystalline egg.

  Without a word he came forward, put it in Belem's hands and turned back to the transmitter. It sighed shut behind him and he was gone – back, perhaps, to the wind and dust of his unknown world.

  Gingerly Belem laid the crystalline globe on the floor between the glass tree and the useless Essen device.

  "This will do what has to be done," he said, looking down at it. "Give us a temporary force-field. It doesn't tap the basic cosmic energies as Dr. Essen's does but I hope it will protect us long enough. After the second-stage Mechandroid wakes we'll be safe. He can take over."

  "And do what?" I asked, a little rebelliously. "Keep us asleep, set up a matrix to guard us – sure. And then send us in to the future? Maybe I don't want to go any more. What good could I do there alone? De Kalb's gone. Dr. Essen's gone. Even Murray would have been more help than nobody. As it is, I'd rather stay right here. It looks like an interesting world, what little I've managed to see of it. If you hadn't interfered I think I could have got along very well with Paynter."

  "Except for one thing," he said calmly. "You're a carrier of the nekronic infection, as I think the People of the Face may have planned from the beginning. As a spur to prevent just what you've suggested."

  "Why are you going, then?" I demanded. "It has nothing to do with you."

  "Yes, it does have. Two things. First – I don't know why I'm going. The order came and I must obey it."

  "From the second-stage Mechandroid?" I asked incredulously.

  "Yes. The second reason is" – He looked up at me over his shoulder. He was kneeling to puzzle over the Essen machine, and gave me a sudden cool smile. "I go under orders," he said. "You go because of the nekronic spur. Do you know why Paynter must go too?"

  "Because you've got him hypnotized," I said. "Why else?"

  "Paynter is infected too." I gaped at him.

  "Of course he is. Why else did he fail to kill you when he knew the danger you carried wherever you went? But suppose he had killed you – and the murders went on? The authorities would have had to look further - they would have found Paynter himself. So long as you lived, you were the obvious scapegoat."

  "All right," I said slowly. "It adds up. Is that the reason why he has to go with us? Does your second-stage age Mechandroid care about that?"

  "Of course not." Belem had turned from the mystifying Essen machine and was working carefully with the milky-crystal globe now, his large fingers moving over it with the same clumsy deftness I had watched so often in De Kalb's identical fingers.

  "Of course not. The real reason is very different. You've probably guessed it already. Do you not know, really, why you have trusted me so far? If your mind had put up any real opposition, I couldn't have done all I did with it. Don't you know why you and I must go on to the world of the Face together – as you first set out to do?"

  I stood there in the dusty cavern, in perfect silence, not surprised to find that I was trembling a little as his metal eyes met mine. After a long time I said, very softly, in a shaken, questioning voice, "De Kal
b – De Kalb?"

  "I think so," he said calmly. Then he reached out and with one finger stirred the heavy dust on the floor. He looked at me, smiling wryly. "De Kalb is there. De Kalb is that. But here – " He struck his head a light rap, "Here I think he still lives. Latent. In abeyance. But still here."

  I sat down suddenly, in the dust that may once have been Jerry Cortland. I was remembering the sudden oblivion hat had briefly overtaken all of us who were duplicates of the sleepers in the cave as those original bodies fell apart.

  "There would be no reason for you to go on to the World of the Face alone," he said, "if you went alone. But you won't. You can't. You never have been alone, have you, in his era? Always Topaz – who is Dr. Essen, asleep – or Paynter, who is Murray, asleep, or I – who am De Kalb – were with you. None of us knew. All of us have been moving along the lines of some pattern vaster than we can guess. Only now it begins to emerge a little."

  As I drew a breath to speak, the sound of the opening panel startled us both. Only Paynter, standing motionless in be grip of his hypnosis, did not move. My quick start was futile but Belem's two hands covered the crystal globe, ready, I think, to activate it and throw out the temporary force-field that would isolate us from attack – for awhile.

  22. REUNION

  We were both expecting soldiers to come pouring from the transmitter. But no one came through the open panel. Instead, a voice spoke. A woman's voice, cool, clear, level.

  "Ira?" it said. "Mr. Cortland? Colonel Murray, are you there?"

  Dr. Essen! I thought. Letta Essen! An instant later Topaz came alone across the threshold.

  It was Topaz and yet – it was Letta Essen too, more clearly than I had ever seen her before in the girl's amazingly adaptable features.

  "I expected this," Belem said with perfect calm. "I didn't even send for her, I was so sure she would have to come. It's the pattern, Cortland. It's working itself out faster and faster now, beyond our control, I think. Is she Letta Essen?"

  I nodded in bewilderment. The voice was not Dr. Essen's, of course, for it came from the vocal cords of Topaz, but it was not Topaz's voice either. It was cool, emotionless, nobody's voice. Dispassion speaking aloud. And the face was Topaz's face but changed, different.

  I had seen the almost fluid mobility with which every emotion altered those lovely features but I had not been prepared for a change like this. And the ego, the soul, of Topaz was submerged. A tight, wary blackness was all that showed now – that and a sort of bright alarm.

  "The soldiers!" she was saying a little breathlessly now, as she hurried toward us across the dust which was her own disintegrated body. "They're following me, Ira. It is Ira?" Her eyes were questioning on Belem's face.

  The Mechandroid nodded. "They're following you?" he demanded. "How much do they know? Never mind – you can tell us later. Activate your machine - quickly!" And he gestured toward it.

  She dropped to her knees beside the metal plate, hesitated, touched it doubtfully. "The connections have been changed," she said. "I can put them back in order but" – she glanced up – "it may take time."

  "How long?"

  "Too long." She looked from face to face, a little of Topaz's facile despair coming through the calm. "The soldiers – " Belem's breath hissed through his teeth. We turned, seeing the panel in the wall opening again. Bright uniforms gleamed through the gap.

  Belem's hands flashed with blinding speed above the crystal egg. Then a tower of golden light shot up like a fountain and spread out above us. It thinned as it spread, came showering down again into an enclosing hemisphere. Its brightness faded until we were looking through amber glass at the soldiers who came swarming from the transmitter, more and more with every opening and closing of the panel. Their weapons spat fire at us.

  A burst of starry light sparkled on the amber of our shield and died. Another nova flared and faded against the screen. And another.

  "We're safe," Belem said calmly. "For a few days, until the power dies. By then the second-stage Mechandroid should waken. But meanwhile, Dr. Essen – you had better repair your machine if you can."

  She nodded, the bright curls tumbling. Then she rose and stepped carefully around the motionless, glittering tree toward the milky egg that was projecting our temporary salvation.

  "I can't remember – very clearly," she said. "There was light – and then suddenly I knew I was myself – with some memories of a girl called Topaz." She frowned. "Maybe it would be clearer if – may I see your projector, Ira? Belem? Which are you, now?" She looked searchingly into his face.

  "I am Belem," the Mechandroid said. "Do you know what it was that roused you out of the Topaz-state and reawakened the Essen mind? We are nearly sure now that, in the moment the time-axis shell and the sleeping bodies inside it crumbled, their sleeping minds merged with the minds of the physical duplicates. Why is not yet known. Why the minds of Paynter, Topaz and myself remained dominant while Cortland's submerged the mind of his host is still – "

  He paused. For Topaz – Dr. Essen – was bending above the luminous egg. Now she seized it, lifted it high, and with one smooth gesture smashed it against the rocky floor.

  It was Topaz, of course – not Letta Essen, never Letta Essen.

  The amber shell above us began to rift and shimmer into tatters. Beyond it the armed men pressed forward, shouting. A lance of hot white light shot past Belem's head and spattered fire from the rocky wall behind him. Topaz laughed, a shrill, high sound of pure excitement.

  Then Belem moved.

  He fell to one knee beside the shattered globe from which amber light was dying swiftly. His hands settled down over it, heedless of the sharp, cutting edges of the broken crystal. And his body began to glow.

  Swiftly the rifted light in the shell above us began to mend itself. The amber shining spread, met, joined. The armor strengthened, was solid again.

  I could feel the tremendous energy pouring out of the Mechandroid's mind and body. It made the air quiver inside the hemisphere. As a man may suicidally bridge a gap between two charged electric wires, so Belem was using himself now. I saw him shudder as that frightful energy poured through him.

  Paynter, forgotten in the melee, suddenly stirred beside us. I saw him take an uncertain step forward, then another, the blankness fading from his face. Belem's mind was losing control over his. Released from the hypnosis, active now, our enemy – he emerged from his paralysis.

  From outside the shell that was our only hope the confused shouts of the soldiers came thinly. One voice rose above the rest, an officer's voice, full of urgent command.

  "Topaz!" it shouted. "Topaz – stop the Mechandroid!"

  Her quick response made double clear what had been clear enough before. She was wholly their tool. She had never been Letta Essen. Their integrators had worked out the truth as quickly as the Mechandroids had fathomed it and Topaz was a ready instrument to their hands. She was still their most dangerous weapon and she had not failed yet.

  I heard her high, clea laughter, in response to the call and I whirled in time to see her snatch out a tiny, glittering weapon exactly like that rubber-lipped paralyzer Paynter had once turned upon me. This was smaller and it glittered with jewels and the flexible ring of its muzzle was fantastically colored. But it was no toy. I saw the lips suck in as she pressed its trigger, ready to send out a web of paralyzing force upon Belem.

  The Mechandroid neither saw nor heard. All his mind was concentrated on keeping the force-field active. He was depending wholly on me.

  I flung out an arm just in time to throw Topaz off balance. The bright-lipped weapon spat out its web, which floated just clear of Belem and flared into violent oblivion against the amber shell around us. Topaz hissed savagely at me and fought to level her weapon again at Belem. She was lithe and astonishingly strong, a protean shape that writhed snake-like in my arms.

  There wasn't anything I could do about Paynter. He was almost fully awake, and reaching half dazedly for the gun at his belt.
Topaz, twisting furiously, was trying now to center her paralyzing weapon on me. Above us the shell of force began to tatter again. There was a limit to Belem's powers.

  My mind, ranging wildly for an answer, stumbled upon the mad thought of re-hypnotizing Paynter. I knew I had not the power but – suddenly my glance fell upon the glittering little tree at my feet. There in its base was the switch I had once seen De Kalb press, a thousand years ago.

  After three tries I reached it with my toe. Topaz was a furiously writhing burden in my arms, almost overbalancing us both. But the jeweled branches lighted, began slowly to move.

  "Paynter!" I barked. "Look at that – look at it!"

  He was not yet fully out of his hypnosis. He turned, startled, saw the branches that were spinning now with a dizzying blur of brightness. He grimaced and looked away.

  Recklessly I let go of Topaz with one arm to point at the whirling tree.

  "Look!" I yelled insistently. "Paynter, look."

  My own eyes were averted but I could see his head turn as he glanced at the hypnotic spinning. His head turned away again, slightly – but not his eyes. They stayed fixed, focused on lie tree.

  Slowly, slowly his head swung back, till he stood facing the circling lights. Intelligence faded from his stare. His hand dropped from his belt.

  Simultaneously I realized that Topaz was no longer fighting me. She too was watching the tree.

  Hypnotized – both of them.

  Paynter said in a dazed voice, "Cortland – Cortland, is that you? De Kalb? What's happening?"

  "Murray?" I said, softly, tentatively. I knew it was probably a trick and yet – under the hypnosis of the tree the submerged mind of Murray might be wakening.

  Belem let out a long, shuddering sigh. His body slumped. And the amber force-field about us seemed to run down like water and vanished. Across the suddenly cleared space the soldiers stared at us, caught for a second by surprise. Their eyes sought Paynter's.