by Hal Annas
On what he judged to be the third day he again saw Arnbod who was also a prisoner.
“They no longer trust me,” Arnbod explained. “Because of Taps. She and her kind influence them as they influence life outside and they fear control from her era.”
Arnbod had been exploring the corridors. From the room in which he’d left Moxol, on his return from the opposed time stream, he could again effect a crossing, and while he might not survive there he wanted to be ready if Taps called him.
She’d returned to her era, but Evela, being a witch, had been held at the interim point where her subconscious was used to aid the metal men in awakening inferior metal and influencing life in the other time stream.
“What,” Moxol asked, “do those opposed to us expect to accomplish?”
“They grow stronger,” Arnbod explained, “by taking the spark of life from creatures in your era and incorporating it into their own composition. They think that eventually it will make them masters of both time streams.”
It came clear then why mankind would not survive.
Waiting until he was alone, he took minutes to get the thought firmly fixed in his mind that his blade and gun would lead him back the way they had come. At the end of a passage they vanished. He stepped forward and discovered that what had seemed solid offered no resistance to his body. Beyond, his blade and gun were again leading the way.
Through winding corridors, which seemed to differ in no way from the solids about him, they led him up to the room in which he’d first come to awareness here. Tremors ran along his spine. Here he’d been stabbed by innumerable points.
Straight ahead was the wall inside of which the girl had been held by metal bands. She was not visible now. He advanced, touched the wall. It was warm, seemed to be alive. As he experimented, it opened up enough for his body to pass through.
In the next room the girl was on a high table under a brilliant light. Metal instruments were hovering above her uncovered body. Her lips moved almost imperceptibly.
“The crescent,” she said. “Cut around the crescent,” and the scapel lowered itself and touched her body just below her left breast.
In the microsecond that seemed an eternity Moxol saw the crescent, just over her heart. It was a milky white semi-circle in startling contrast to the remainder of her dusky flesh. It brought memory of the dark stain on his blade, the Dexbo witch, the man he’d killed before parting the curtains and stepping into her presence.
The scapel pressed into the girl’s flesh. Her body quivered, tensed. A single drop of blood appeared. And as Moxol’s blade whistled through the air, it seemed that the scapel would press on down and through her heart. His blade struck it, sent it spinning.
There was a moment, as the girl came up to awareness, in which the instruments vibrated in mid-air, their points turned toward Moxol. He held in mind the thought that they were under his control, and they remained there, unmoving.
Evela trembled in every fibre. Glancing about wildly, she became aware of her nudity, of him, of her surroundings. His blade poised within an inch of her breast. The dark crescent near the point was in vivid contrast to the white one on her flesh. But they were of equal dimensions, and it dawned that one completed the other, as the dark half of a planet completes the lighted half.
“Taps,” Evela cried.
There was a moment of what seemed to be overlapping time, space and matter, and then the misty pink vision appeared. She seemed no more real than before. Bait the filmy outer garment which she removed and draped about Evela was real. It brushed Moxol’s hand and felt like thistledown.
“Can you get me back to my ship?” Moxol demanded.
Evela’s trembling ceased. She slid off the table, stood between ham and Taps. “Only with the aid of the metal men,” she said.
Taps shook her head, led the way to the wall which opened and admitted them into the room from which he’d come. Overhead the miniature planets moved imperceptibly, turned on their axis. At a control panel Taps paused, touched keys in rhythmical order, and before them appeared, in the depth of the panel, two crescents, one dark, the other white.
They were facing but slightly displaced. They didn’t complete, one another. But as Taps worked with the controls they moved closer together and finally appeared as, Moxol knew, this planet viewed from space.
Taps continued working with the controls until one point of the black crescent separated from the point of the white one. The room, the atmosphere about him vibrated, and again there was an overlapping of time, space and matter.
He heard the ringing of bells, the grating of intercom and visicom, the roaring of orders, saw bright flashes, felt the floor beneath his feet shudder and rock as if the waves of photonic energy, and suddenly realized he was aboard ship. The sounds became clearer and more real, and he saw movement about him.
Evela clutched his arm. Taps pressed close. The fear that trembled through them conveyed itself to his own body. The Novakkans, Who, until this moment, had seemed to pass through their bodies now became aware of them. More startled than fearful, the Novakkans hesitated, turned toward the man bending over instruments before a screen.
The man, Moxol saw, was he himself. He spoke and the voice was the same. There was a slight difference in intonation. The olive hue of the skin was too bright, the scars too new. But in lowered awareness, Moxol knew, anyone would be deceived. He had the uncanny feeling that he was looking at his own reflection.
Freeing himself from Evela’s clutching hand, he snatched the man away from the instruments, stared into his startled face. The illusion was the same. He felt that he was looking at himself.
The Novakkans recovered. Their hesitation had been but a moment. Now a dozen knives gleamed in a dozen green-tinged hands. Evela gasped, then screamed. From dim remoteness came a tinkling high-pitched sound of fear. The Novakkans moved in concert, ringed him, the two girls, and the squirming image of himself.
The blades flashed, leaped toward his body. His own blade moved to parry. It met only the faintest resistance. It seemed to be slashed in two by the first blade that struck it. The blades came on, dimly as in a dream, passed through his body and through the bodies of the girls.
Sounds faded. The shuddering and rocking ceased. Movement about him became evanescent, intangible, finally vanished.
He was back in the control rooms, between the two girls, still holding the squirming image of himself. It was as if the events of a moment before bad never been. It was as if the struggling man had materialized here.
Taps worked the controls, and as she did the two crescents came together again formed an image of the planet as it would be seen from space. And as Evela stared at the man the illusion that he resembled Moxol minutely subsided.
“Doctor!” Evela cried. “What—”
She never finished the question. The Havelonian tore himself free, leaped to the panel, moved controls. Instantly metal came alive all about them, in all shapes. There was a moment of confusion, a moment of fading awareness, a long moment as Moxol struggled with his own thoughts in effort to control the metal, a moment in which, it seemed, the whole planet rocked and shuddered.
In the distance a visicom voice grated, “The galaxy is in chaos. The war has reached proportions to stagger the imagination. Killing goes on indiscriminately . . .”
There was the sound of an explosion.
In those seconds that his mind worked desperately to control the metal, Moxol moved in response to his training. He flung one arm about the head of the doctor and crushed it as an eggshell.
The metal that had come alive so suddenly fell clattering.
Dropping the lifeless body, he leaped to that part of the wall he knew to be the mouth of the corridor leading to the interior of the planet. He’d come along it minutes before and now knew those seeking to control outside life would use it to reach this point.
Nor was he wrong. In the next moment he was fighting desperately against the most dexterous blades he’d ever
encountered. They moved as living instruments, in the hands of metal men, and he grasped that that was precisely what they were. They concentrated on his photon gun and smashed it to atoms.
But never had his own blade moved more swiftly, more certainly. As always, it responded to the slightest flexing of a muscle but now as if it were a living extension of that muscle. Points got past it, true, but they never reached a vital spot. His training, in addition to mental control of the metal, made a vast difference, he knew. His own blade drew blood until it was crimson to the haft, until the spurting blood from his enemies mingled with that flowing from his own wounds.
How long he could’ve held that passage would forever remain a doubtful question. Doubtful because at the moment he was hardest pressed other metal-men came from the depths, along the same passage, and attacked those before him. In rapport, with him, he grasped, they had mentally followed him to this point.
It was over in short order, and as he stood unsteadily in his own blood, the men with whom he’d been imprisoned took charge of the controls.
“The Dexbo witch,” he muttered. “I must get to her. I must learn the things written concerning Moxol the Murderer to the last detail. There is no other way to halt them.”
Arnbod said, “We can’t reach Dexbo at the moment. But whatever befalls, you can be certain we will find her and, in our own time stream, take those writings down through the ages—that those in your past, eons before you, may read of Moxol who at last became Master of Metal.”
Evela talked softly as she attended his wounds. “When I came aboard your ship on Mallika I told you I loved you. Though I’ve hated it I’ve known I belonged to you since you sacked the Mallikan cruiser and took me as a prize.”
“You’re a witch,” he said.
She admitted it. “My powers began when I was fourteen, when the white crescent suddenly appeared on my body.” She gave him a date and hour that corresponded to the time he’d first noticed the dark crescent on his blade.
“I still love you,” she added.
“Witch!”
“Have you,” she asked, “ever before known a young witch?”
He shook his head.
“Then I must tell you,” she said, lowering her black eyes, “a young witch is the best of all lovers.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
RINGED by metal men, Moxol stood before the visicom. Evela stood on one side of him, Taps on the other. His voice was firm, crisp, positive:
“This I declare to you throughout the length and breadth of the galaxy: The things written concerning Moxol the Murderer have been fulfilled. You were influenced by energy from the dark star which modified here and broadcast subtly to enter your subconscious while it used your intelligence to awaken life in inferior metal. It brought unrest and war. It caused accidents and innumerable deaths that couldn’t be explained. In the hands of the ambitious, it almost wiped out life in your era.
“Now we enter a new era. Those in the opposed time stream move on toward their future which is your past. We in our time stream move on to our future and destiny which lies in their past.
“Intelligence can be exchanged between the two time streams. Crossings may be accomplished to hasten progress. Because of these things an enduring peace must be arranged. For your future holds much.
“Understanding beyond your dreams.” He put an arm about Evela, drew her close. “With this dark girl to aid me,” he said, “I am Master of Metal. I can bring you many things.” He turned to Taps. “And this bright vision,” he added, “is also of our time stream. Unwittingly she influenced those in the opposed time stream to work against us.” Again he turned to Evela. “But this one has made her understand. With her high awareness of life, even in a void, she and those in her era will remain in communication with us.
“One thing alone remains.” He beckoned and Arnbod handed Evela a small slender blade. “This you must learn. Watch.”
Evela toyed with the blade a moment. Then it flashed, point first, toward the visicom, and he knew that it seemed to those watching that it would come and strike them. On receiving visicoms, he saw vast audiences flinch.
The blade hung there for a moment, then leaped back in Evela’s hand.
“You must control the things that have influenced you,” he added, “just as I have arranged, through this control, a galaxy-wide Strak hookup.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ALETA watched as Rahn Buskner bent his seven and a half feet of height and closed his great hand around the pen.
Except for the space about the table, the vast room was thronged by representatives of every planet and race she could name. Egs had a place of honor between Earth emissaries and Novakkans because their planets had suffered most and the peace pact was being signed here.
Out of the corner of one blue eye she saw the Earthwomen watching her enviously, and she was not unaware of the impression made by her tall, stately figure, gowned as it was in the richest of garments. But it was not this that interested her.
Her eyes studied her daughter who stood so proudly beside the tall young commander from Delos. Aline’s auburn beauty had become more mature, more subtle. She looked supremely happy.
At the end of the table Moxol seemed hardly interested in the proceedings. He seemed preoccupied, she thought, and it could be accounted for only by the way that small dark girl flashed her eyes at him.
Aleta smiled to herself. The dark girl, she knew, would suffer many lonely nights, many days of worrying, for Moxol, like his father, would be restless and frequently away on jaunts to the end of the galaxy. But always there would be hours of bliss, long days and nights of happiness, to make it all worth while—when he returned.
Rahn Buskner straightened and Aleta turned to him. She watched him lift the special table, on which the peace pact had been signed, and break it across his knee. He flung half to the Novakkans, the other half to Earthmen, to be reduced to splinters as a symbol that no superseding pact might ever be signed to violate so much as a comma of the peace agreement.
He towered head and shoulders above those around him. His naked upper body and lower legs were marked with what to others would appear ugly scars, still other scars, she knew, marked that part of him covered by his Novakkan skirt and wide belt. But to her they were not ugly. They were souvenirs of his determination to protect her, to provide for her and the children until they were grown. She knew each scar intimately, for many of them she had attended when the blood was still gushing out.
And she suddenly knew that she loved him more than she could ever have loved her childhood sweetheart Norwich Wyatt. For only he could’ve sired Moxol, Master of Metal, who had at last brought about the peace she had vowed, even before Aline was conceived, must come.
She reached up to his shoulders, felt his great arms come about her protectingly.
“The children are happy and have their own lives to live,” she whispered. “Take me home to Castle du David. I want to see the golden-skinned Unorians again.”
THE END
What you have just read is the Third Book in a series of three; the first was "Reckoning From Eternity/’ published in our November 1955 issue; and the second was "Daughter of Doom/’ published in our February 1956 issue. If you missed either, or both, don’t let it bother you in the slightest! All you have to do is to send 10c for either one, or 20c for both (to cover the cost of mailing, envelope, handling) and we will be happy to send you the magazine or magazines free! There is no need for you to miss the previous 60,000 words of thrilling adventures of the characters you’ve come to know in this issue. In publishing OTHER WOR1DS, our purpose is to delight you with fine science fiction, and we will permit no minor frustrations to mar your enjoyment. Thus, it is just another of our unique services to all our reader friends to make available something you might have missed through no fault of your own. We always order extra copies just for such eventualities, and we make no charge for this, other than our basic expenses. Just enclose your dime or dimes i
n an envelope and address it to OTHER WORLDS, Amherst, Wisconsin, and yoifr copies will come to you by return mail.
If you liked Hal Annas’ story, then we have a tip for you. Don’t miss the next issue of OTHER WORLDS, because in it will appear the first Book of a two-book novel totaling 87,500 words, called "The Timeless Man" by Roger Arcot. This is, in our estimation one of the finest novels of science fiction with a capital SF that we have ever read. OTHER WORLDS is proud to be able to present, as part of its already wonderfully successful drive to bring science fiction back to its finest glory, this great story. It will thrill you as no story ever has, and your editor banks his 30-year reputation on the certainty that you’ll be forever thankful you didn’t ignore this tip.
My Head is Ticking
Most men, when kissed by a beautiful woman, find their hearts beating faster, but in this case, it was a ticking in the head that occurred; and it was in Morse Code!
I DON’T know just when I became a of my genius is in handling figures and genius, but I do know I wasn’t born up until a few weeks ago my ability one. I mention that fact because part to calculate mathematically was reduced by one-tenth whenever I sprained a finger.
When this ticking began in my head I told Alan Haynes about it. “Sounds like one of those office machines,” I said.
“Has anybody slugged you with a brick?” he asked.
I studied over that, then shook my head, and it was then that his rather vacant eyes lit up and his face took on a sort of human look. “Wiggle your head again,” he said.
I obliged and he leaned close and listened. “It’s a clock,” he said. Then: “No. It’s stopped.”
Haynes is a brainy sort, thirtyish, plump, ugly, and with his antics gives the impression of an unreformed idiot, but behind his tendency to lift girls’ skirts with the crook of his cane, and slap nervous people on the back and yell “Fire,” is an amazing ability to penetrate to the core of any puzzle.
