Earth's Last Fortress

by A. E. van Vogt

  The key was metal! The key—

  Desperately, she stopped the repetition. The apartment door slammed behind her, and like some terrorized creature she fled down the dark stairs into the glare of the night streets. Impossible to return until she had answered the burning question in her mind. Until she had made sure!

  After half an hour, a measure of coherence came. In a drugstore, she bought an overnight case and a few fill-ins to give it weight. A pair of small pliers, a pair of tweezers—in case the pliers were too large—and a small screwdriver completed her equipment. Then she went to a hotel.

  The pliers and the tweezers were all she needed. The little bulbous cap of the skeleton-type key yielded to the first hard pressure. Her trembling fingers completed the unscrewing—and she found herself staring at a tiny, glowing point, like a red-hot needle protruding from the very center of the tube that was inside the key. The needle was absorbed into an intricate design of spiderlike wires, all visible in the glow that emanated from them.

  She thought uncertainly that here were probably terrific energies. She was not restrained by the possibility. But enough of the reality of the danger stayed with her to make her wrap her flimsy lace handkerchief around the tweezers. Then she touched the shining, protruding needle point. It yielded the slightest bit to her shaky touch. Nothing happened. It continued to glow.

  Dissatisfied, she put the key down and stared at it. So tiny, so delicate a machine actually disturbed to the extent of one-sixteenth of an inch displacement. And nothing happened. A sudden thought sent her to the mirror. A forty-year-old face stared back at her.

  It was months since she had returned to twenty. And now, in a flash, she was forty. The touch of the tweezers against the needle’s end, pushing, had aged her twenty years.

  That explained what had happened at the police station. It meant that if she could only pull it back…She fought to steady her fingers, then applied the tweezers.

  She was twenty again!

  Abruptly weak, she lay down on the bed. She thought: Somewhere in the world of time and space was the still-living body of the man that had been Jack Garson. But for him she could throw this key thing into the river three blocks away, take the first train east or west or south, and the power of the machine would be futile against her. Dr. Lell would not seriously consider searching for her once she had lost herself in the swarm of humankind.

  How simple it all was, really. For three long years, their power over her had been the key and its one devastating ability to age her. Or was that all? Startled, she sat up. Did they count, perhaps, on their victims believing themselves safe enough to keep the key and its magic powers of rejuvenation. She, of course, because of Jack Garson, was bound to the key as if it were still the controller, and not she. But the other incentive, now that she had thought of it, was enormous.

  Her fingers shook as she picked up the key with its glowing, intricate interior. It seemed incredible that they could have allowed the precious instrument to pass so easily into the hands of an alien, when they must have known that there was a probability of discovery.

  She had an idea then; she grew calm. With suddenly steady fingers, she picked up the tweezers, caught the protruding glow point of the key between the metal jaws and, making no attempt to pull or push, twisted clockwise. There was a tiny, almost inaudible click. Her body twanged like a taut violin string, and then she was falling, falling into dark, immense distance.

  Out of that night, a vaguely shining body drifted toward her, a body human yet not human. There was something about the head and the shoulders, something physically different, that eluded her slow thought. And in that strange, superhuman head were eyes that blazed like jewels, and seemed literally to pierce her. The voice that came couldn’t have been sound, for it was inside her brain, and it said:

  “With this great moment, you enter upon your power and your purpose. I say to you, the time-energy barrier must not be completed. It will destroy all ages of the solar system. The time-energy barrier must not be completed!”

  The body faded, and was gone. The very memory of it became a dim mind-shape. There remained the darkness, the jet-black incredible darkness.

  Abruptly, she was in a material world. She seemed to be half-slumped, half-kneeling, one leg folded under her in the exact position she had occupied on the bed. Only she must have drooped there unconscious for long moments. Her knees ached with the hard, pressing pain of her position. And, beneath the silk of her stockings was, not the hotel bed, but metal!

  8

  It was the combination of surprise, the aloneness, and the stark fact of what was happening that unnerved Garson. He started to squirm, then he was writhing, his face twisted in agony. And then the strength of the rough, stolid hands holding him seemed to flow somehow along his nerves.

  He willed himself calm. And was safe from madness!

  There were no hands touching him now. He lay, face downward, on a flat hard surface; and at first there was only the darkness and a slow return of the sense of aloneness. Vague thoughts came, thoughts of Norma and the coincidence that had molded his life, seemingly so free for so many years, yet destined to find its ending here in this black execution chamber. For he was being destroyed here, though his body might live on for a few brief mindless hours. Or days. Or weeks. The time didn’t matter.

  The thing was fantastic. Surely, in a minute he’d wake up from this nightmare.

  At first the sound was less than a whisper, a stealthy noise out of remoteness, that prodded with an odd insistence at Garson’s hearing. It quivered toward him in the blackness, a rasping presence that grew louder—voices! It exploded into a monstrous existence, a billion voices clamoring at his brain, a massive blare that pressed at him. Abruptly, the ferocity of the voices dimmed. They faded into the distance, still insistent, somehow reluctant to leave, as if there was something still left unsaid.

  The end of sound came, and, briefly, there was utter silence. Then there was a click. Light flooded at him from an opening a scant foot from his^head. Garson twisted and stared, fascinated. Daylight! From his vantage point, he could see the edge of a brick-and-stone building, a wretchedly old, worn building, a street of Delpa.

  It was over. Incredibly, it was over. And nothing had happened. No, that wasn’t it exactly. There were things in his mind, confusing things about the importance of loyalty to the Glorious, a sense of intimacy with his surroundings, pictures of machines, but nothing clear.

  A harsh voice broke his amazed blur of thought. “Come on out of there, you damned slowpoke!”

  A square, heavy, brutal face was peering into the open door. The face belonged to a big, square-built young man with a thick neck, a boxer’s flat nose, and unpleasant blue eyes.

  Garson lay quite still. It was not that he intended to disobey. His reason urged instant, automatic obedience until he could estimate the astounding things that had happened. What held him there, every muscle stiff, was a new, tremendous fact that grew, not out of the meaning of the man’s words, but out of the words themselves.

  The language was not English. Yet he understood every word.

  The sudden squint of impatient rage that flushed the coarse face peering in at him brought life to Garson’s; muscles. He scrambled forward, but it was the man’s big hands that actually pulled him clear and deposited him with a jarring casualness face downward on the paved road.

  He lay tense for an instant, fighting mad. Yet he dare not show his anger. Something had gone wrong. The machine hadn’t worked all the way, and he must not wreck the great chance that offered. He stood up slowly, wondering how an automaton, a depersonalized human being, should look and act.

  “This way, damn you,” said the bullying voice from behind him. “You’re in the army now.” Satisfaction came into the voice. “Well, you’re the last for me today. I’ll get you fellows to the front, and then—”

  “This way” led to a dispirited-looking group of men, about a hundred of them, who stood in two rows along
side a great, gloomy, dirty building. Garson walked stolidly to the end of the rear line, and for the first time realized how surprisingly straight the formation of men were holding their lines, in spite of their dulled appearance.

  “All right, all right,” bellowed the square-jawed young man. “Let’s get going. You’ve got some hard fighting ahead of you before this day and night are over.”

  It struck Garson, as he stared at the leader, that this was the type they picked for non-recalcitrant training: the ignorant, blatant, amoral, sensual pigman type. No wonder he himself had been rejected by the Observer. His eyes narrowed to slits as he watched the line of dead-alive men walk by him in perfect rhythm. He fell in step, his mind deliberately slow and ice-cold. Cautiously he explored the strange knowledge in his brain that didn’t fit with his freedom.

  It didn’t, in fact, fit with anything that had happened. But it was there, nevertheless, a little group of sentences that kept repeating inside him: The great time-energy barrier is being built in Delpa. It must not be completed, for it will destroy the universe. Prepare to do your part in its destruction. Try to tell the Planetarians, but take no unnecessary risks. To stay alive, to tell the Planetarians, those are your immediate purposes. The time-energy barrier must not—not—”

  The repetition grew monotonous. He squeezed the crazy thing out of his consciousness.

  No trucks came gliding along to transport them, no streetcar whispered along in some futuristic development of street-railway service. There was no machinery, nothing but those narrow avenues with their gray, sidewalkless lengths, like back alleys.

  They walked to war; and it was like being in an old, dead, deserted city. Deserted except for the straggle of short, thick, slow, stolid men and women who plodded heavily by, unsmiling and without a side glance. As if they were but the pitiful, primitive remnants of a once-great race, and this city the proud monument to—no! Garson smiled wryly. It was foolish to feel romantic about this monstrosity of a city. Even without Dr. Lell’s words as a reminder, it was evident that every narrow, dirty street, and every squalid building had been erected to be what it was.

  And the sooner he got out of the place, and delivered to the Planetarians the queer, inexplicable message about the great time-energy barrier, the better off he’d be. With deliberate abruptness, he cut the thought. He’d have to be careful. If one of the Glorious should happen to be around, and accidentally catch the free thought of what was supposed to be an automaton, next time there’d be no mistake.

  Tramp, tramp, tramp! The pavement echoed hollowly, like a ghost city. He had the tremendous thought’ that he was here centuries, perhaps millennia, into the future. What an awful realization to think that Norma, poor, persecuted, enslaved Norma, whose despairing face he had seen little more than an hour ago, was actually dead and buried in the dim ages of the long ago. And yet she was alive. Those six hundred billion bodies per minute of hers were somewhere in space and time, alive because the great time-energy cycle followed its casual, cosmic course of endless repetition, because life was but an accident as purposeless as the immeasurable energy that plunged grandly on into the unknown night. Tramp, tramp, on and on, and his thought was a rhythm to the march.

  At last he came out of his reverie, and saw the red haze in the near distance ahead. It wouldn’t take ten minutes more, and they’d be there! Machines glinted in the slanting rays of the warm, golden, sinking sun; machines that moved and fought! A sick thrill struck Garson, the first shock of realization that this tiny segment of the battle of the ages was real, and near, and deadly. Up there, men were dying every minute, dying miserably for a cause their depersonalized minds did not even comprehend. Up there, too, was infinitesimal victory for the Planetarians, and a small, stinging measure of defeat for the Glorious. Forty feet a day, Dr. Lell had said.

  Forty feet of city conquered every day. What a murderous war of attrition. What a bankruptcy of strategy. Or was it the ultimate nullification of the role of military genius, in that each side knew and practiced every rule of military science without error? If so, then the forty feet was simply the inevitable mathematical outcome of the difference in the potential in striking power of the two forces.

  Forty feet a day. Wonderingly, Garson stood finally with his troop a hundred yards from that unnatural battlefront. Like a robot he stood stiffly among those robot men, but his eyes and mind fed in undiminished fascination at the deadly mechanical routine that was the offense and defense.

  In the limited area that he could see, the Planetarians had seven major machines, and there were at least half a hundred tiny, swift, glittering craft as escort for each of the great—battleships. That was it: battleships and destroyers! Against them, the Glorious had only destroyers, a host of darting, shining, torpedo-shaped craft that hugged the ground and fought in an endlessly repeated complicated maneuver. He could guess that similar battles progressed for a hundred miles all around them.

  Maneuver against maneuver; an intricate game, whose purpose and method seemed to quiver just beyond the reach of his reason. Everything revolved around the battleships. In some way they must be protected from energy guns, because no attempt was made to use energy against them. Somehow, too, cannon must be useless against them. There was none in sight, nor was there any other method of propelling solid objects at the machines. The Planetarians did not even fire at the more than a hundred troops like his own, who stood at stiff attention so close to the front, so bunched that a few super-explosive shells of the past would have smashed them all. There was nothing but the battleships and the destroyers!

  The battleships moved forward and backward and forward and backward and in and out, intertwining among themselves; and the destroyers of the Glorious darted in when the battleships came forward, and hung back when the battleships retreated. And always the destroyers of the Planetarians were gliding in to intercept the destroyers of the Glorious. As the sun sank in a blaze of red beyond the green hills to the west, the battleships in their farthest forward thrust were feet closer than they had been at the beginning; and the sharply delineated red line of haze, which must be the point where the time-energy barrier was neutralized, was no longer lying athwart a shattered slab of rock, but on the ground feet nearer.

  That was it. The battleships somehow forced the time-energy barrier to be withdrawn. Obviously, it would only be withdrawn to save it from a worse fate, perhaps from a complete neutralization over a wide front. And so a city was being won, inch by inch, foot by foot, street by street. Only the intricate evolution of the battle, the way of that almost immeasurably slow victory, was as great a mystery as ever.

  Garson thought grimly: If the message that had come into his brain in that out-of-order depersonalizing machine was true, then the final victory would not come quickly enough. Long before the forty-feet-a-day conquerers had gained the prize that was Delpa, the secret, super time-energy barrier would be completed, and the human race and all its works would be eliminated from the universe.

  Night fell, but a glare of searchlights replaced the sun, and that fantastic battle raged on. No one aimed a gun or a weapon at the lights. Each side concentrated on its part of the intricate, murderous game, and troop after troop dissolved into the ravenous, incredible conflagration.

  Death came simply to the automatons. Each in turn crowded into one of the torpedo-shaped destroyers. Each individual had learned from the depersonalizing machine that the tiny, man-sized tank was operated by thought control. Highly trained in that limited sense, the human automaton flashed out to the battleline. Sometimes the end came swiftly, .sometimes it was delayed, but sooner or later there was a metallic contact with the enemy, and that was all that the enemy needed. Instantly, the machine would twist and race toward the line of waiting men; the next victim would drag out the corpse and crawl in himself.

  There were variations. Machines clashed with the enemy and died with their drivers, or darted aimlessly out of control. Always, swift metallic scavengers raced from both sides to c
apture the prize; and sometimes the Planetarians succeeded, sometimes the Glorious. Garson counted: one, two, three—less than four hundred men ahead of him. As he realized how close his turn was, cold perspiration beaded his face. Minutes, damn it! He had to solve the rules of this battle, or go in there without a plan, without hope.

  Seven battleships, scores of destroyers to each battleship and all acting as one unit in one involved maneuver.

  And, by heaven, he had a part of the answer. One unit. Not seven battleships out there, but one in the form of seven. One super-neutralizing machine in its seven-dimensional maneuver. No wonder he had been unable to follow the inter-twinings of those monsters with each other, the retreats, the advances. Mathematicians of the twentieth century could only solve easily problems with four equations. Here was a problem with seven, and the general staff of the Glorious could never be anything but a step behind in their solution. That step cost them forty feet a day.

  It was his turn! He crept into the casing of the torpedo cycle, and it was smaller even than he had thought. The machine fitted him almost like a glove. Effortlessly, under his direction, it glided forward, too smoothly, too willingly, into that dazzle of searchlights, into that maelstrom of machines. One contact, he thought, one contact with an enemy meant death; and his plan of breaking through was as vague as his understanding of how a seven-dimensional maneuver actually worked.

  Amazed wonder came that he was even letting himself hope.

  9

  Norma began to notice the difference, a strange, vibrant, quality within herself. She felt warmly alive, a new kind of aliveness added now to the life that had always existed within her.