[Jan Darzek 05] - The Whirligig of Time

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

Finally Qwasrolk spoke a word. He repeated it twice, and the third time Darzek was able to understand. He was saying, "Error."

  "Where?" Melris asked.

  Again Qwasrolk spoke. It sounded like no place in the galaxy that Darzek had heard of, but there were millions of worlds in the galaxy. Melris asked again, "Where?"

  Then Darzek caught the answer. "Plans." Or - "In plans." Suddenly he understood. Qwasrolk had been performing some kind of experiment, and it had gone wrong, and he was still trying to figure out why. That was the meaning of the sketch and the scribbled calculations Darzek had found in the grove.

  "Is that what happened at Nifron D?" Darzek asked suddenly.

  The lidless eyes rested on him. "Error - in plans - at Nifron D." It was becoming easier to understand him.

  Then Qwasrolk spoke wildly and tried to sit up. "Still error in plans." He had to repeat that twice before they understood.

  Then Darzek said, "Another experiment with an error? Where is it being performed?"

  "Here."

  "Here - on Vezpro?" "Yes."

  "Can you show us the place?" "Yes."

  And before they could move, he vanished.

  22

  Darzek recovered first. He went at once to the entrance and looked out. The first person he noticed was Miss Schlupe, standing in the center of the tunnel some twenty meters away and looking about her apprehensively. He motioned to her, and she started toward him.

  He turned to Wolndur and Melris and pointed at the stone wall, which ended the tunneled street and also served as the side of the stall. "What's on the other side?" he asked.

  They gazed at him blankly.

  "This must be a remnant of an underground transportation system," he said. "Segments of it were blocked off long ago for markets and fungus farms. I'm an idiot for not having thought of it before. Move a transmitter frame into an unused part and you have a perfect place for a secret underground laboratory. How far does it go?"

  They were still staring at him. Their civilization had been transmitterized for hundreds of cycles, and references to underground transportation meant nothing to them.

  Miss Schlupe pulled the slats aside and stuck her head in. "Things under control?"

  "Where are the commandos?" Darzek asked.

  "I brought about a hundred of them. The rest will be along as soon as they're rounded up."

  Darzek went outside the shop where he could study the wall in the bright light of the tunnel. It looked as though nothing less than a charge of dynamite would make a dent in it. "It'd probably take days to break through," Darzek said, "and if we just casually started using sledgehammers here, someone might ask an embarrassing question."

  Miss Schlupe stood beside him and studied the wail. "You want that thing knocked down?"

  "No. I just want a hole big enough to crawl through and see what's on the other side. We'd probably need a lot of handlights, though, and I haven't seen such a thing on Vezpro."

  "Then you haven't looked very well. There's a shop just down the tunnel that sells them. Why do we have to do the hole-knocking in public? It's the same wall inside there, isn't it?"

  "So it is. Let's have a look."

  At the rear of the stall, they found a doorway leading" into a small room. Some previous tenant had taken advantage of his position next to the wall to add a stockroom to his premises, rent free - and the stockroom was beyond the wall. Darzek removed a few slats with one kick. The dark tunnel stretched beyond.

  He turned to Miss Schlupe. "Go buy a couple of hundred handlights, if they have that many. And have your commandos slip in here inconspicuously, two or three at a time."

  "Right," she said. "But I'll need a few with me, to carry all those lights. And I'll have to post guides to tell the others where to go."

  "Do that," Darzek said.

  She hurried away, and Darzek turned and sat down on the low cot Qwasrolk had been occupying. "I think he really wanted to show us what he was talking about," he said, "but his mind's been affected to the point where he doesn't realize that others can't travel the way he does. You two did a remarkable job with him. I only hope something results from it."

  "We were lucky," Melris said. "We just happened to look in the right place."

  "That was because you kept on looking. And you gained his confidence - not even the doctors were able to do that." Darzek paused. "The question is whether he'll come back."

  Miss Schlupe's commandos began to slip into the stall. Darzek showed them the stockroom and told them all to crawl into the tunnel, sit down in the dark, and relax. He felt hopeful but not optimistic. For all he knew, the old transportation system was part of an intercity network with thousands of kilometers of tunnels. A thorough search might take years, and they had less than three days.

  He said to Wolndur, "Are there archives somewhere that would have a map of these tunnels?"

  Wolndur didn't know.

  Suddenly Qwasrolk stood before them. He said, sounding impatient, "Come. I'll show you."

  "Waft!" Melris said quickly. "We can't go the way you do. We'll have to walk. Or use a transmitter."

  Qwasrolk considered this perplexedly. "Is there a transmitter?" Darzek asked.

  Three more of Miss Schlupe's commandos slipped into the stall and moved past them toward the stockroom entrance. Their presence momentarily startled Qwasrolk, but not nearly as much as his presence startled them. They stared at him but managed to keep moving.

  Darzek asked again, "Is there a transmitter?"

  "Transmitter?" Qwasrolk's blurred speech echoed. Not needing one, it probably had not occurred to him to look for one.

  "Is it close enough to walk?" Melris asked.

  "Walk?" Qwasrolk echoed. He pondered the question as though a teleport had no concept of distance.

  "Is it in a tunnel?" Darzek asked.

  "Yes. Tunnel."

  "This tunnel?" Darzek persisted.

  Qwasrolk hesitated. "I'll see," he said, and vanished.

  Miss Schlupe's commandos continued to arrive. Then she came herself, accompanied by a squad carrying boxes of handlights. "A hundred and fifty-seven was all they had," she said. "Shall I look for more?"

  "No. We'll only need to use a few at a time." "Qwasrolk?"

  "He's been back. He went to see whether it's in this tunnel and how far it is."

  Miss Schlupe arched her eyebrows. "It?" "That," Darzek said, "is the question."

  "We're beginning to arouse a bit of curiosity. At least seventy-five people have gone in here, and no one has come out, and there can't be room for that many. Shall I have them keep coming?"

  Darzek reflected. "No. Have them wait outside as inconspicuously as possible. No need to bring them all in when we don't know where we're going."

  She turned and spoke briefly to someone outside, and the flow of commandos stopped. Darzek returned to the cot; Wolndur paced up and down; Miss Schlupe talked quietly with Melris. They were waiting without knowing what they were waiting for.

  Suddenly Qwasrolk reappeared, almost colliding with Wolndur.

  "Come," he said.

  "Is it in this tunnel?" Darzek asked. "Yes."

  "Can we walk?" "Yes. I think so."

  "How far is it?"

  Qwasrolk gestured. "Far. I think."

  He vanished again, but they found him in the tunnel on the other side of the wail, gazing perplexedly at the commandos. Miss Schlupe hurriedly sent word to the group waiting outside and began to pass out handlights. Darzek gave one to Qwasrolk.

  "You lead the way," he said, "and we'll follow you. And we'll see if we can get that error corrected."

  "I lead," Qwasrolk said. And promptly vanished.

  It was the strangest journey Darzek had ever experienced.

  Qwasrolk traveled in teleporting leaps. He vanished, and eventually they would see the beam of his handlight far ahead of them where he sat waiting - if the tunnel chanced to run straight at that point and t
here were no obstructions. When they approached him, he vanished again.

  Darzek, Miss Schlupe, Wolndur, and Melris led the way, with the commandos spread out behind them. They had no idea how long the handlights would last, or how long they would need them, so they used only a few. The footing would have been difficult even in good light. They had to examine the tunnel floor for holes and crevasses, and Darzek kept flashing his own light on the ceiling, which was riddled with cracks and sagging blocks of stone. Occasionally the ceiling had collapsed, partially or almost completely blocking the tunnel, and the debris had to be climbed over.

  "How far have we walked?" Darzek asked finally.

  Miss Schlupe chuckled. "If you're tired, I can have my commandos carry you. I've been working out with them. The only thing you've exercised since you arrived here is your brain."

  "Not even that," Darzek said bitterly. "For all our detective work, can we honestly claim to have a suspect?"

  Miss Schlupe reflected. "No. But Qwasrolk has some connection with it."

  "As a dupe," Darzek said. "He must have been one of the Nifron D scientists, and he was on the planet when it blew. Do you suppose the villain left him there on purpose to make last-minute adjustments without his knowing what was going to happen? That would explain his talk about an error. He thought it was a different kind of experiment."

  "Anyone who would do that - callously sacrifice a loyal employee - might very well blow up a world of five billion people."

  Darzek nodded soberly. "No doubt you're right. There may be something impersonal about destroying a world of strangers, but the scientist who would deliberately destroy an assistant and perhaps a friend in the interest of an experiment certainly wouldn't hesitate to destroy Vespro, evacuated or not, if he thought he had a reason for it. I wonder how many of those missing scientists died on Nifron D and on the eleventh planet."

  "Qwasrolk survived only because he could teleport."

  "He must have had latent abilities he wasn't aware of himself until he experienced the pain and horror of having the world he was standing on turn into a sun. At that instant his ability stopped being latent, but an instant was enough to burn him terribly and expose him to radiation that should have killed him."

  "He reacted like a hurt child," Miss Schlupe said. "He simply went home. To Skarnaf. To the place where he was born and raised. Only the old homestead was gone, so he was found lying in a ditch."

  "It must have happened that way," Darzek agreed. "And Qwasrolk must know who the villain is - but he may not know him under his real name."

  "That'd be a pretty problem." Miss Schlupe observed. "It wouldn't do us much good to know the person responsible is Mr. X from planet Y. What is Qwasrolk going to show us?"

  "An elaborate scientific device with an error in it, I hope - the same error that made a supposedly innocent scientific experiment turn a world into a sun."

  "If we find the thing, what are you going to do with it?"

  "It shouldn't be difficult to make it inoperable. There must be various kinds of circuitry involved. There must be an electrical source that sets the thing off. There may even be a timing device, set to make contact one second after the new year begins. I think we can easily convert this thing to junk - if we can find it."

  "And then what?"

  "We leave your commandos in charge. Sooner or later our villain will show up to find out why it didn't work. He may bring some scientists with him, but I'm sure they'll be able to handle the situation."

  "I guarantee that they'll handle it," Miss Schlupe said.

  They rounded a curve in the tunnel, clambered over another fall of ceiling debris, and saw Qwasrolk's light waiting for them in the distance. As they approached, he vanished once more. Squinting into the darkness, Darzek could make out his own light reflected far ahead. That wasn't unusual. Previously, it had meant that there was another fall to climb over, or that the tunnel curved.

  This time it meant neither. They marched straight ahead, on level ground, until suddenly a wall loomed in front of them. It was constructed of a concretelike material, and it stretched from one side of the tunnel to the other, and from floor to ceiling. Darzek kicked it and hurt his foot.

  He studied it for a long time. Finally he said to Miss Schlupe, "You carry a lot of odds and ends in that bag of yours. I don't suppose you have a sledgehammer. Or a stick of dynamite."

  "Neither," Miss Schlupe said regretfully.

  "Even if Qwasrolk comes back to find out what happened to us, he won't be able to help. We might go back and try to get into the tunnel from the surface on the other side of the wall, but that assumes that we could find the tunnel and that there wouldn't be any embarrassing obstacle on the surface, like Min Kallof's office. Also, it would take a long time without any guarantee that Qwasrolk would wait for us, and even if we succeeded we might walk twenty kilometers and end up at another wall."

  While the commandos waited uncertainly behind them, Darzek, Miss Schlupe, Wolndur, and Melris all found themselves chunks of ceiling debris and sat down to look disconsolately at the wall.

  23

  They had been seated for some minutes when Darzek suddenly announced, "That wall is new."

  He walked over to it and examined it with his handlight. Wolndur performed his own examination and agreed.

  "Who on Vezpro has the skill to build such a wall?" Darzek asked. "No machine did that. You can see the marks of the trowel the tool used to smooth the cement or mortar."

  "Alien workers," Wolndur said. "Sometimes a few are brought in for special projects - historical restoration, or a country dwelling built in the old manner for some wealthy person."

  "So someone brought in a few alien workers - a couple of them could have done a job like this in a short time - and had a wall built across the tunnel. Why?"

  Wolndur gestured bewilderedly.

  Miss Schlupe had come up behind them to perform her own inspection. "I'm betting that there's not one wall, but two," she said. "The two of them would form a nicely hidden, inaccessible underground retreat. Or a laboratory for secret research projects."

  "Or perhaps a place to hide the device that will turn a world into a sun," Darzek suggested grimly. "There must be other entrances to this tunnel. All that was required was to bring a transmitter frame far enough into it so no one would be likely to discover the thing. Then alien workers and materials could be passed through the transmitter. Once the two walls were built, the place would be accessible only by transmitter - which of course would be personalized at once to limit access to the scientists working there. That's how Qwasrolk happened to know about it. Even a teleport wouldn't stumble onto an underground laboratory by accident."

  Some of Miss Schlupe's commandos had come up behind them.

  When they grasped the fact that their destination was beyond the wall, they began chattering in their own language. Several of them started back down the tunnel. After a time they called out, and the whole group followed after them. When it returned, some twenty of them were laboriously carrying a long slab of concrete in their threehanded grasps. It must have been enormously heavy, and - strong as they obviously were - they staggered under its weight.

  As they approached the wall they began to move faster - a shuffle, a trot, a stumbling run. The concrete crashed into the wall.

  They lowered it carefully and stood panting while others closed in with handlights to examine the damage. All they had accomplished was to chip off a few flakes of the wall and convert a millimeter or two of the slab to dust.

  Without comment, another group of commandos picked up the slab, backed off from the wall, and repeated the performance. More chips and dust resulted.

  "The alien workers seem to have been highly competent," Darzek observed dryly. "They'll wear out the concrete before they break through."

  "There's plenty more around," Miss Schlupe said.

  There also were plenty of commandos. A third group took the place of the
second, and a fourth group followed it. Miss Schlupe and Darzek seated themselves and watched while the concrete was repeatedly smashed into the wall.

  "Why didn't we think of a setup like this?" Darzek asked. "The moment I first saw an underground mart, I should have known. Me, from New York, not recognizing a subway!"

  "Your excuse is better than mine," Miss Schlupe said. "You didn't visit a mushroom farm. Now that I think about it, looking down that long bed of fungus, I should have been able to see a train coming."

  The concrete crashed again. Darzek said reproachfully to Wolndur, "You're the scientist. How do we get through the wall? Tools? Is there such a thing as an explosive on this planet?"

  Wolndur's face instantly became a blank study. He was a theoretical physicist. He probably knew what tools were, but he certainly had never seen a sledgehammer or a pneumatic drill, and Darzek wouldn't have trusted him to set off an explosive charge if one had been available.

  "I don't suppose we could get a vehicle in here," Darzek said.

  "Those falls we had to climb over -"

  "You couldn't get one through that storeroom anyway," Miss Schlupe pointed out.

  "Right. It'd delay things a bit if we had to start by knocking down the other wall. I don't recall seeing a vehicle on this world anyway."

  He sighed. "This isn't one of my better days. Since I came to Vezpro, I haven't had any better days."

  The concrete crashed again.

  Darzek got to his feet. "I might as well go back. I'll see if the plans for the subway system still exist and what government assistance I can get in a hurry. You wait here -"

  Qwasrolk stood before them. He seemed less timid in the dim reflection of a few handlight beams. His hideousness was blurred; there was no glow for his lidless and probably damaged eyes to wince from.

  Before he could speak, Melris said, ''We can't get through the wall, Qwasrolk."

  "What we need," Darzek said thoughtfully, "is a couple of matched, portable transmitter frames with their own power supply. One here, and one where this error has to be corrected. Is it just beyond the wall?"