Taylor blinked, closed his eyes and opened them again.
The vision did not dissolve or shimmer or go away.
Bitterly, his heart dying within him, he knew he was staring at the remnants of a long-since-buried New York.
Nova murmured uneasily behind him. An animal sound.
A low, hissing wind stole over the devastated landscape.
“Well—” Taylor said softly, more to himself than to the girl. “Home sweet home! Just look at this graveyard, Nova. It’s the grand climax of fifty thousand years of human culture—yes. I wonder who lives here now. Besides radioactive worms.”
No answer came.
Like all dead things, ruined New York was inscrutable.
“Let’s go see,” Taylor said to the girl and urged their mount down the slope toward the big graveyard before them. There was still nothing but those masses of scrub and tombstones. Nova suddenly plucked urgently at Taylor’s arm. She beckoned wildly.
Taylor looked, gaping.
Unbelievably, a tremendous change had swept over the panorama below. A huge, inexplicable wall of fire had sprung up directly in their path. It seemed to have started in the shrubbery, cutting amazingly across the bare rock and sand, building into a raging inferno of heat and brightness. The horse reared on its hind legs, neighing in terror. The high barrier of flame, crackling and sending out great waves of scorching heat, completely concealed buried New York from view. It had seemed to vanish in the twinkling of an eye.
“What—what the hell’s feeding it?” Taylor bellowed hoarsely. “There’s nothing to burn.”
The horse had U-turned violently, almost flinging the two of them off. Taylor cursed and hung on. The crackling flames licked ever nearer, closing in on them. Now the horse took to the gallop, racing away from the unknown, plunging down the slope again, leaving New York and the incredible wall of fire hidden below the horizon.
“We’ll reach it another way,” Taylor said grimly, urging the horse forward in a flanking movement. He meant to circle the city and approach from another direction. From the inland side, far removed from the mysterious blaze and its source.
They passed the oasis once more, pushed on over the open, trackless dry wastes until the horse’s hooves touched a flattened plain which afforded easier going. The cloudless blue sky showed the empty horizon beyond the plain. Taylor made for it, conscious of a nagging confusion in his brain and Nova’s mutelike trust in him.
“Okay, here we go again.”
He had to talk, had to say something. Whether the girl understood him or not. Hearing his own voice was a measure of reality in a universe gone mad.
He turned the horse to make a second approach.
But the unrealities had mounted.
Scarcely had they started when a colossal clap of thunder shook the heavens and instantly, magically, black clouds roiled, the skies darkened overhead, and within seconds the world turned black. From below the far horizon, rods of forked lightning struck. The horse reared in bewilderment and terror. Like glittering stakes in an electrified fence, each lightning rod struck down to the earth. What was worse, they seemed to advance toward Taylor, the girl and the horse. Advance relentlessly to the accompaniment of vicious thunderclaps. And then rain, fiercely falling, hissing rain, sluiced down in blinding sheets. The sky, so recently blue, had opened up into a sea of dark fury. The horse kept on rearing, whinnying, bellowing its terror. Taylor fought the beast, keeping it from bolting altogether in the face of nature’s onslaught.
“Nature seems bent—” Taylor panted, “on wiping out our mistake. Hold it!” He struck at the horse, holding its head while Nova huddled behind him. Their drenched bodies fused in limp, liquid union. At a gallop, they retreated from the sonic, sodden storm. The horse kept on racing until the thunder and the rain diminished. Until they had found a blue sky again and the miracle of a nature gone berserk was behind them. Taylor reined the flagging horse to a standstill. Then he turned it around again for still a third approach to the New York that lay buried in the distance. He was determined—it was mad of him, he suspected—to go back to that dead land. He couldn’t have said why it was important to him.
But the world was truly mad.
The elements had run amuck.
Nature was still awry.
Rising directly in his path—his, the girl’s and their horse—was a wall of ice. A thick, glassy, solid, unmelting barrier of ice. A paradox of eye and mind, giving the lie to the bright ball of sun blazing down from the blue sky above.
Taylor’s mind stopped.
He was frightened now, really frightened. The awesome mass of crystal towering down dwarfed all his logic, all his strength.
“That wasn’t here,” he murmured. “A minute ago, that wasn’t here!” He turned to Nova; the girl was cowering behind him, hiding her eyes from the terrible apparition. “And it isn’t just me who’s seeing things,” Taylor breathed scratchily. He steadied the horse’s restive head. “Can two people have the same nightmare?”
Shocked, he led the horse away from the precipice of ice. The girl hugged him, her nails digging into his weary body. Taylor shook himself dumbly. Before he could make another move, a tremendous, seismic crescendo of sound rumbled behind him. The girl blurted a scream. Taylor caught himself in time. A gigantic fissure, as palpable as death and fear itself, had yawned in the earth and Taylor desperately managed to careen the horse so that it avoided the mammoth canyon of nothingness that had suddenly loomed before its hooves. Thank God the poor beast was sufficiently exhausted for him to control it. If it had bolted suddenly…
Taylor turned to Nova. Urgency made him mime the words he spoke to her now. It was imperative that she understand him.
“Nova! If you—” he pointed to her, “lose—me—” he pointed to himself, “go to Ape City.” She recoiled in horror at the words. He shook his head. “Not to the gorillas. Go to the chimpanzee quarter. There’s no other way.” He fought against the incomprehension in her terrified eyes. “Find Zira. Zi-ra…”
She nodded now, less fearfully, recognizing the name of the sympathetic female chimpanzee doctor who had helped them escape to the Forbidden Zone. But she clung to his hand, not letting go until she knew he wished it. Taylor dismounted from the horse, purposefully unslinging the rifle from the bolster on the saddle. There was now a ten-yard ledge between the crevice and the precipice of ice. Taylor shook himself once again, feeling his brains boiling over.
“Impossible! But it’s there—I’m not dreaming. Or else I—or maybe the whole universe—has gone mad!”
He advanced furiously on the ice face.
Nova, on the horse, watched him, fright fixing her face.
Taylor used the butt of the rifle, attempting to chop out a foothold. The gun cut a swath through the air. Taylor followed through hard. Yet the phenomena, the amazements, the unrealities, were a long way from done.
The rifle struck. With a flick of sound.
And passed clean through the wall of ice, vanishing.
Taylor, unbalanced by the unexpected lack of resistance, followed the vicious swath of the rifle.
And also vanished.
It was as if he had stepped through a bead curtain.
There was nothing on the ice face of the precipice to indicate where he had been. Or had gone.
And then the wall of ice was gone too.
It was nowhere to be seen.
There wasn’t anything anywhere for miles around but the flat, ordinary, cruel wasteland. The landscape was completely deserted.
The girl Nova screamed.
And kept on screaming.
Until her screams were lost in the vast wilderness of silence.
Until there was Nothing.
3
BRENT
He clambered through the open escape hatch, carrying the vital medical equipment and oxygen apparatus. The crumpled steel sides of the small reconnaissance spacecraft had never seemed so vulnerable to him. Now, set down in a crash landing on
some unknown, perhaps alien planet, it was twice as toylike and futile. Being lost in space was one thing, but this was the penultimate in Nowhere. Never had he seen so much limitless desert waste, so much unending distance between things. He felt like a small boy wandering amidst the vast trackless expanses of Time itself. There was no telling where Life began—or ended.
The skipper was still lying where he had left him. Head propped on a mound of sand, his rugged body spent and looking for all the world like a battered rag doll. The impact of the crash had banged the skipper up plenty. There was no immediate telling the extent of the personal damage.
As he bent over the skipper, the equipment clattered metallically. The skipper stirred, eyes open, face haggard in the fierce blaze of an unseen sun.
“Who’s that?” The question was a feeble attempt at authority.
“Me again, Skipper.”
He passed his hand twice over his superior’s eyes. He saw that they did not flicker at all.
“Brent?”
“Sir?”
Skipper was breathing with great difficulty now. Brent busied himself quickly. First he gave Skipper a pill, then an efficient injection by hypodermic in the left arm, and then settled down to a rhythmic, powerful chest massage with his bare hands. Skipper almost smiled at that but the look in the dulled brown eyes was remote, distant, as though fixed on some faraway place that only he could see. The emblem swatches of the United States flag sewn into the left sleeve of the tunics both men wore, shone like blood in the tropical blaze of daylight. Brent resisted the mental image.
“Did you contact Earth?” Skipper rasped, his voice getting weaker with each breath he drew.
“Tried to, sir. Not a crackle.”
“Isn’t the set operational?”
Brent frowned. “I don’t know, sir. I ran a crosscheck of the Operations Manual. As suggested, I took an Earth-Time reading just before re-entry.”
“Well?”
“Three—nine—five—five.” Brent spaced the numbers very very slowly, as if he still couldn’t believe them himself.
“Hours?” Skipper stirred again, almost trying to rise. Brent steadied him with a firm restraining hand. “There are only twenty-four…”
“Not hours,” Brent said. “Years.”
Skipper breathed hoarsely. The unseeing eyes seemed to freeze.
“Three thousand—nine hundred—and fifty-five?”
“A.D.” Brent agreed, drily.
“Almighty God.”
In the brief silence, both men might have been listening to the hissing, scorching wind sweeping over the baking landscape.
“We were following Taylor’s trajectory,” Brent continued, trying to hang onto his calm. “So whatever happened to us, must have happened to Taylor—” he continued to massage his superior’s chest.
“What about us? Where are we?”
Skipper sounded like a desperate blind man, trying to see what he never might again.
“In my opinion, sir, we’ve come through a Hasslein Curve, a bend in Time.”
Skipper groaned feebly, falling back in greater pain than before. The damning facts had only augmented his poor condition. Brent tried to rally him, knowing how hopeless that was on the face of it. His superior, by all the signs, was a dying man.
“Look,” Brent spoke rapidly. “I don’t know what planet we’re on. I know it’s fantastic but the fact is, we’re both of us here, wherever that is. Breathing. Conscious. There’s oxygen on this planet—and water. You’ll be okay, Skipper. We’ll run a navigational estimate…”
The unseeing man at his side stared mightily up into the alien sky. His face was bleached, almost lifeless.
“God, if I could only see the sun!”
“You can feel it on your hand, Skipper,” Brent said very quietly. But his brain wasn’t quiet at all. It was rioting.
“Yes—but which sun?”
“I don’t know. Our computer is shot. We’re lucky to be alive.”
“Lucky—?” Skipper echoed with sudden fury and strength. “No! If it’s A.D. 3955—oh, God! My wife—” His breathing was obviously becoming more difficult. “My two daughters. Dead, Their sons. Daughters. Dead. Everyone I ever knew. Everyone!”
“Yes, sir,” Brent agreed, more quiet than ever. “But I’m trying not to believe it.” He was too, with every fibre and atom of his being and reasoning power. “It’s quiet here, sir. God, it’s quiet.”
It was. There was no sound, no movement, save for the almost furtive whisper of that phantom wind hurrying over the limitless expanses of sandy soil. This unknown planet was a wasteland.
Skipper suddenly pressed both deadening hands against his own chest and choked violently, desperately.
“Oxygen—” he gasped. “More…”
Brent leaped to obey, his heart hammering, his pulses pounding. Not even all of the intense, highly technological education instilled in him by the Space Program had ever prepared him for this. Sudden Death is forever a blow, a shock to the nervous system, no matter where, when or how it strikes.
Within the next torrid hour, he was burying Skipper. Shoveling sand over a rough grave just beyond the dune where the spacecraft had crashed to earth. A melancholy assignment, endured with aching muscles and ragged nerve ends, with tears poised on the lids of each eye. Brent was a young, athletic, handsome astronaut; clear-eyed, level-headed, with the look of eagles in his eyes. But Skipper’s dying reduced him to a terribly lonely and frightened young scientist.
He felt like a small boy lost in a maze.
It was only when he had patted the last shovel of loose sand over Skipper’s grave that the man in him returned. The one who had wanted to explore outer space and learn the secrets of the skies.
For it was then that he heard the first sound of life on this planet since the spacecraft had come down; the initial indication that other forms of animal life existed on this unknown, blazing chunk of terra firma beyond the stars.
He heard the clopping sounds of the horse’s hooves long before he saw the beast and the savage-looking female riding it.
Nova, forlorn and aimlessly wandering since the strange disappearance of Taylor, had blundered across the path of the wrecked reconnaissance spacecraft. Another lost child.
Brent watched her from the concealment of the sand dune overshadowing Skipper’s grave. He didn’t make a move until it looked as if Nova would continue on her way. The horse was balky, frightened.
Then he sprang erect, looming before her path, waving his arms, calling out “Hi!” like a maniac, blocking the way.
Nova stared down at him, her gaze torn between him and the shining wreckage of the spacecraft. Brent came closer, cautiously, quietly now, not wanting to frighten her off.
“Who are you?”
Nova did not answer.
“Can you understand me?”
Nova continued to stare, eyes uncomprehending. Brent came still closer. As bewildered as he was, he decided he had never seen a more beautiful, primeval-looking female in all his life. She might have stepped out of one of those old Tarzan movies of the twentieth century.
“Don’t be frightened,” he said easily, smiling to make it more palatable. “Just tell me where I am.”
Still she did not answer.
“My name is Brent.” He reached out to touch the horse’s nose in a gesture of friendliness. “Brent—!” With the same fervor which had characterized Taylor’s attempts, Brent mimed his own name, pointing to himself with grand gestures. Nova gazed down at him, unblinking. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking, what her attitude might be. Brent felt defeat rise in his chest but he shook it off.
“I’m not going to hurt you—I just want to know where I am. Where are you from? Where are your people? How do I get to them? Which way? Can you talk?” He paused, watching her closely. He had his answer in her mute, unspoken demeanor. “You can’t talk.”
Bitterly, he shook the rage out of his brain. The defeat.
Then his
eye caught sight of the identification tag looped about her dusky throat where its bright disc caught the rays of the fierce sunlight.
“You have a name—?” She didn’t flinch as he reached up to turn the tag toward his own eyes so that he could read it. In that single instant, Brent felt all the miracle of rebirth. And a hope for Tomorrow. The name TAYLOR, clearly imprinted on the disc, set off rockets in his heart, soul and mind. “TAYLOR! Is he alive? Is he hurt?”
Now, for the very first time, Nova came to life. Her eyes lit up, showing emotional response. She nodded excitedly. Once, twice, three times. Her whole body seemed to take on new vitality. The horse shifted its weight with her movements. Brent, now more desperate than ever to make himself understood, literally seized on all the play-acting ability at his command. He was using sign language, gestures, vocal emphasis to get through to this strange young woman, who had wandered from nowhere to find him.
“Look… is there anyone… any other… someone who can talk…?”
Nova smiled at that, dismounting from the horse.
Brent took heart.
“You—” he pointed to her, “take me—to Taylor.”
Her smile widened. A dazzling, marvelous smile that rivaled the sun overhead. She relooped the ID tag about her throat. Without asking her permission, Brent quickly mounted the horse directly behind her back. She started at that, staring at him, uttering a tiny cry of dismay. Brent grinned, urged the horse forward and motioned her to mount behind him. With a glad cry, she did so, huddling against his shoulders. Brent looked at her, just once more.
Their eyes met. Held.
“Taylor,” he said. “Now.”
The dazzling smile once more washed over him.
“Where?” he asked.
She held onto him, even more closely than before. He could see that her gaze was focused intently toward the right. Whatever direction of the compass that might be.
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