by Hal Annas
However confused, there was no doubt what was taking place in the passage. They were hammering on the doors.
This time they would come in with photon guns.
He might hold one entrance for a while, but he couldn’t hold two.
The thought came that it would be better to open the door and meet them head on. It was the best way to die, and he would take a number with him. Then he thought of the girl.
She returned his skirt which he wrapped around his arm. She handed him his blade, and as he balanced it in his hand he cast about for some place to hide her.
A Novakkan was expected to die fighting, and he had no regrets, but he wanted her to have another chance. She’d seen nothing but the bitter side of life.
“Get on your couch,” he said, “Hide under your garments. It may be that they’ll be satisfied with my body.”
She shook her dark head. “If you can delay them a few moments. I’m calling to my friend Taps. She’ll have to come to us through the metal era. She’ll be terribly frightened and unable to do anything for a moment or two.”
He didn’t understand. There was nothing reasonable about it. But he did know that the door would crash in another moment.
He pushed her behind him, bent his right knee, placed his left foot well back.
The photon gun was in his left hand, and as the door smashed inward its energy flashed and flamed.
CHAPTER NINE
IN those moments of fighting for his life and the life of the girl behind him, he became aware of unreal happenings. Out of the corner of a reddish brown eye, as his blade decapitated an adversary, he glimpsed a misty vision in pink.
She was fairer even than his mother. Her hair and lashes were misty platinum. Her skin was as white as milk with a tinge of pink beneath its translucent surface. He realized then that the pink mistiness was not the color of her diaphanous garments, but light radiating back from her flesh.
She seemed insubstantial until another appeared beside her. The second was masculine. His metallic-like skin was bronze, his garments gold in color. He, too, seemed insubstantial and confused. But for a moment only.
He pushed the girls against the bulkhead and set them to doing something to its surface.
Moxol lost sight of what happened next. Though he stepped back from it the point of a blade bit into his forehead. There was a moment of stinging, a moment of brilliant flashes as the point struck bone, and then blood was gushing out and down into his eyes.
Something plucked at his arm, tugged. A voice shrilled in his ear, “This way.”
Blinking and rubbing his eyes, he tried to clear his vision, felt a hot lance of pain in his side, and then he was staggering along in response to the tugging.
Someone seized his other arm, steadied him.
He experienced a sensation of falling and clutched wildly at the nearest object. His hand closed on something soft and he knew that it was Evela’s shoulder. She gasped in pain before he was able to ease his grip, and then her arm came about him. Her other hand reached up to wipe the blood from his eyes.
It was difficult to keep his eyes open. The lids dropped by reflex. But as Evela stopped the flow of blood from his forehead his vision cleared.
They were four, he, Evela, the misty vision of a girl, and the man whose skin looked like metal. And they were alone, so far as he could see.
It took a moment to grasp that they were no longer in the girl’s compartment. They were not in any compartment; they were moving slowly through bulkheads.
At times he saw other movement and as he studied it realized it was made by Novakkans.
The Novakkans seemed insubstantial.
In the dock of a courier ship they paused. In the distance the clamor of conflict went on. The voice from Operational had said that the mutiny had been subdued. It was apparent that a new one had broken out.
As Evela led him through the courier’s airlock he thought he understood her intention. But, he knew, it was futile. A courier could no more escape a raider than it could stand beside it in battle. And even if escape was possible he could not abandon his ship.
At this point he was able to talk and hear. But, though he saw their lips moving, he couldn’t hear those with him. It was as if they stood on. different planes of existence. Their form was not definite.
They closed round him. Gradually their bodies became solid. Their words, faint and remote at first, became clearer.
Evela said, “You’re attached to this point. We can’t hold you away from it.”
He shook his head to clear it and again blood flowed into his eyes. She pressed close, tore a strip from her garment, bound it about his head, then examined his side. Two gashes showed there and his belt and shorts were crimson with blood.
She unwound his skirt from his left arm and tried to tear it.
“You couldn’t cut it with a blade,” he said. “Nor burn it with a minor ray. Come.”
He led her to the medical compartment and stood patiently while she stopped the bleeding and fastened a compress over the wounds in his side.
Faint vibrations ran through the courier. He turned toward the controls where the metallic-like man strove to solve their combination.
“Don’t attempt a launching,” he warned. “You wouldn’t survive long enough to take a deep breath. A light charge can rip a courier out of the cosmos.”
The man turned to face him. The misty pink vision turned with him, advanced. The man spoke and his voice grated as metal.
“We can’t hold you away from this point, he said. “Our only way to take you with us is in a ship.”
“I can’t abandon my ship and my men,” Moxol said. “Nor can I leave my armada. Someway I have to retake control.” To Evela. “How long was I asleep?”
She shook her dark head. A day, a week. There’s no way to tell.”
“How long?”
“We don’t think it was long, but in crossing the time streams there’s no way to tell. You might move forward in time and then be brought back. If you can get in touch with a planet or ship that remained in the same time stream you may learn the date and hour.”
“Did the armada attack the Earth fleet?”
“We think it began the attack over and over and each time was brought back. We have no certain way of knowing. Memory becomes cloudy. What may’ve happened seems like a premonition or something lived in another life. It isn’t definite.”
“What about the Havelon doctor?”
She seemed surprised. “What about him?”
“When I returned from neutral space you and he were in the dissecting room.”
Her obvious astonishment rose. “I’ve never seen the inside of a dissecting room. The thought of such a place gives me shivers.”
It was becoming more confusing all the time. He determined to make one more try.
“You told me you were not from this era, but from the future. Yet you differ vastly from your two friends.”
“Taps,” she said, beckoning.
The pinkish vision came close. And even near at hand she looked unreal.
“Tell him,” Evela said. “If you can make him understand.”
Taps’ voice was as evanescent as her appearance. It seemed to come as tinkling music from a great distance. Some words faded out; others were indistinct; but he grasped the gist of it.
“I’m from the future in your time stream,” she said. “Arnbod,”—she gestured toward the metallic-like man—” is from the opposite time stream. He is my friend and yours. I had to come through his era. He wouldn’t let me come alone.”
It was still confusing. He prodded her to make it clearer.
“Time is an indefinite thing,” she said. “No one understands it entirely. It’s been assumed that at the velocity of light time is zero. But that is a contradiction. On that basis a ray of light could traverse the void from Andromeda in zero time, for at its velocity time would cease. But time itself is a measure of motion. To life and intelligence it is a conve
nient way of measuring directions. From yesterday to tomorrow. In your time stream the universe is expanding and running down. In Arnbod’s stream it is compressing and speeding up. In mine the universe is stable. Being stable, it yields its secrets. It lets us know there is life and intelligence even in a void.”
“But Evela? Of what era is she?” Taps seemed to understand the question. She turned to Arnbod. “Your purpose,” she said. “Make him understand your purpose.”
The metallic-like man brushed back his flaming red hair. “I am under your command,” he grated to Taps. “At least in this time stream. I have to help you help him. In my own time I am with those who think mankind is unworthy, who think mankind should be destroyed.”
The sounds of fighting came nearer. Arnbod glanced apprehensively toward the airlock. “We must leave this ship,” he insisted. “Those of my era are again taking control. If they find me aiding mankind—” He broke off, lifted both arms wide in a gesture.
Moxol felt Evela clutch his arm, hide her face against his chest. His own breathing stopped; his heart paused in mid-beat. With the gesture of the metallic-like man red flames leaped up about them: thick, gray smoke roiled overhead. And then there sounded the howling of a thousand tortured demons.
As quickly, the flames died away, the smoke vanished and the howling ceased. Whether it had been an illusion was a question Moxol couldn’t answer. But it had served its purpose. It had shown that, caught aiding mankind, Arnbod would suffer a fate too horrible to contemplate.
“Can you get Evela safely off this ship?” Moxol asked.
“I can take her to my era,” Arnbod said.
Taps stepped in front of the metallic-like man, facing him, and her voice sounded remote as of tinkling music: “She wouldn’t be safe there, and I don’t yet know whether she can go on through to my time. It may be best that she die and that her life and intelligence enter another body.”
The talk still confused Moxol. To him life was transient and not of great value in the overall scheme. With Rahn Buskner’s raiders he’d learned early that the passing of an individual meant little in the vast galaxy. Now the talk was of the dark girl. From the first moment aboard the Mallikan cruiser there’d never been a time when thought of her death wouldn’t have brought a great sense of loss.
The casual way Taps touched on the subject roused his fighting blood. He had no intention of letting her take that way of escape.
Sounds at the airlock brought him tensely alert. Blade in hand, he moved in that direction, and as he moved he saw a small semi-circle of metal come from beneath Arnbod s garments. No hand guided it. Of its own volition it leaped toward him, fastened itself round the back of his neck.
His hands clawed at it, but the effort was wasted. It dug into his flesh, touch nerves. Spinning dizziness came. Strength drained out his legs.
Blackness came over him.
As he sank slowly he heard Evela’s cry of agony. He was aware of movement about the airlock. He was aware of vibrations as someone worked the controls, cut in the reactors and launched the courier.
A single word burned deep in memory: “Witch!” It sounded as tinkling music from a distance, faint and fading. How he knew that it referred to Evela was a question he would never be able to answer. But in that moment as the final shade of consciousness faded, he knew that the girl who had claimed her universe was stable, who had announced that she was aware of life and intelligence even in a void, who had brought about the miracle that had taken him from the girl’s compartment, and saved his life in the face of overwhelming odds—that girl had pronounced Evela a witch.
The remainder came to him as shadowy realities jumbled in time. In the courier they fled the raider. The confusion in Operational kept the men from turning a light battery on the courier until it was well out. This responded to a nebulous sort of reasoning. Nothing else could’ve enabled tire courier to reach the nearest gravity standout.
Inside the standout, they were comparably safe. Its field would deflect the course of a raider at high velocity and even turn aside photonics.
They plunged on into what mystery he had no idea. It seemed that an eternity of time passed. And in the same manner it seemed that it was but a second.
CHAPTER TEN
IN some indefinite way, as if he’d become part of the overall consciousness, the life and intelligence existing even in a void, Moxol grasped the answers to the strange deaths and events aboard the raiders. Metal awakening to life.
The portent was dreadful beyond imagining. A flesh and blood life might vanish.
As if to emphasize this thought, echoing cries of agony beat against his eardrums. They seemed to come from a great distance and to be on all sides at once. They seemed to come out of the metal about him and out of the air he breathed. They were everywhere, screams of pure anguish both mental and physical.
They were pleas for help. They begged for conscious information concerning his surroundings, information that would enable their owners to free themselves from unimaginable suffering.
It dawned that this was metal life in the throes of birth and that it was using his intelligence to achieve awareness. Through his senses, his knowledge of externals, his desires and needs, it was becoming acquainted with its surroundings.
His first need was to free himself from the force that held him helpless. And with the thought he was able to take note of his surroundings.
Thoughts of Evela surged over Siam. No longer was there mystery about how she had got aboard the raider. In her terror she became attuned to the opposite intelligence. Her need to escape Mallika was foremost in her mind.
The metal life had given her a way of escape in this ship because it wanted to go on using her life and brain to awaken other of its kind.
He hadn’t any doubt that life in the opposed time stream must first attach itself to life here to achieve a crossing.
How he might make use of this knowledge was the next question. The metal had granted his foremost need. He was free to move, to plan. He determined to test whether he might make demands.
Summoning every spark of mental and nerve energy in his body, he demanded full awareness of what was taking place about him. And then he knew that he, too, was of the future. By using both his own mental energy and that of the opposed time stream he became aware of life on every hand.
Everything was alive.
Time stood still, and for a brief moment he was omniscient. It seemed natural. Many times in his life he’d had glimpses of the overall pattern of natural law. He’d known that this was common to others. But no one accepted it. No one dared accept into his belief supernatural power within himself. And yet he’d seen and understood.
Throughout the galaxy metal was coming to life. The cries of anguish were from flesh and blood incorporated into metal. Over the millennia that man had devoted his thoughts and energies to making the inanimate respond as a machine, as a servant, it was impossible, he realized, that metal wouldn’t capture something that was man. And it had turned it to use to dominate the universe.
It mattered not that the thought conflicted with reality as viewed from the opposed time stream. He was looking at it from the viewpoint of man. And in the view he saw a horrible end for all sentient life in his own time.
Full awareness came to his surroundings. He was in a metal room of enormous proportions. No recollection came of the courier landing on a planet, but he knew such a room would not be aboard ship. Overhead were miniature planetary systems and stars precisely as their counterparts were fixed in the firmament. They moved. Near at hand were vast cosmographs with markers that responded to movement in the void.
It took a moment to grasp that here was duplicated in miniature the Milky Way. It took still longer to understand that as he gazed at a specific portion, a constellation or even a single star, it appeared closer and its planets and satellites and comets became distinct and clear, as if he were standing off a few hours in space.
It all seemed unreal, and yet
his sense of enormous power within himself grow.
About him were solids. They in no way blocked his vision. And with this realization he saw Evela. She was within the metal wall between him and the adjoining room. She was held there by bands of metal, denser than the wall, about her legs and arms.
In the room itself were scores of other men and women. Some were chained. Others lay inert. And still others were supine on high tables, under brilliant lights, where unguided instruments cut into their flesh. They were conscious and screaming in protest.
The sight reminded him of the dissecting room where Evela had directed the operation on the Havelonian. As he looked at her now he saw that her lips moved almost imperceptibly. By concentrating he could hear the words. Again she was directing, this time many operations.
“Witch!”
The word came tinkling back from remoteness. It brought memory of Dexbo and the prophecy there. The dark girl was opening the gate, he knew, a little at a time. In each operation metal life would take on a greater semblance of man.
He tried to leap forward, to reach the wall and the girl. Something invisible restrained him. It began lightly and grew as he moved, as a piece of rubber exerting more force the farther it was stretched.
He could only watch. He saw a knife cut deep into a woman’s body. The blood that started ceased almost immediately. Pincers lifted out a living, throbbing organ. Insubstantial metal, in the shape of a human, drew the organ within its being, and instantly took on a semblance of sentience.
Out of nebulous omniscience he knew this scene would be repeated ten thousand times. At the center of the triangle Rahn Buskner’s raiders might now be going through the metamorphosis which had brought his own armada to the point of disintegration and prevented a war from ending.
His sister Aline might be lying supine while inanimate instruments searched her body cells and blood stream for a means of expediting their own awareness.
Flesh and blood!
Material on a table to be worked with.
Nerves and the spark of life!
Just so much matter and phenomena in an experiment.
