by Jimmy Guieu
This harsh command froze them in place. But with a simultaneous reflex Clark and Taylor jumped to the side, diving into the bushes, Clark shoving Shora to the ground. Before even having reached the grass Commander Taylor had flipped off the safety switch of his paralyzing rifle. He fired and swept the park with his ray at maximum power. It was only then that he saw through the leaves the body of a man in a short, tight-fitting, red and white tunic fall forward. The barrel of the machine gun he was holding with two hands stuck in the ground. Paralyzed, he could not let go of his weapon.
“Quickly,” Shora scrambled to her feet, helped by Clark. “You have to hide in house number one on the edge of Mishka.
As they started to run Taylor said, “Shora, it’s better if we get to our helicopter. If we stay too long here we’ll reduce our chances of escaping the Surveillance Commando.”
“We’ll make a detour to reach the north exit of Mishka without going through the city.”
They were panting when they came out of the huge park and were soon on a plain full of scrub and brush where the dried grass fought for the sandy soil with thick plants, signs announcing the nearness of the desert. Beyond the leafy park, around a mile to the south, the terrace-roof of the medical block rose up.
Having avoided the streets of Mishka by this detour, it was not long before they saw their helicopter, glistening in the sun like a huge metal ball with a transparent top. Behind it was parked the triangular ship, its nose pointing toward the sky.
When they reached the oval helicopter they stopped, relieved, and said goodbye to the brave young woman who helped save them.
“Goodbye, Shora. You and Dr. Avshton have been of great service.”
“Goodbye, friends from the Future,” she whispered. “We’re glad we could help. I hope Dr. Avshton got rid of the other guard. We’ll put their bodies in their ship and dump it in the lake.”
“The guard is only paralyzed,” Clark warned her. “He’ll wake up in around half an hour. Better go tell Avshton right away.”
“There’s no need.”
Surprised by this voice they swung around, weapons raised. But before being able to fire they felt a sharp pain in their chest and dropped their weapons, doubling over. Rolansh was lying flat on the sand under the helicopter. He jumped up, picked up the two rifles and backed away, keeping his victims in his sights. He clenched his jaws in anger as they struggled to straighten up, racked with pain.
“So Bertra is only paralyzed,” he smirked. ‘We’ll wait calmly for him to wake up.”
Threatened as they were, they had to obey and waited, moping, not daring to pull out the disintegrators they both had been wise enough to hide under their arms. At the slightest suspicious move Rolansh would not hesitate to shoot and yet every minute lost was making it more dangerous for them to escape when the second woke up. 45 minutes passed like this, the guard watching every move they made. Bertra finally arrived, running up, mad as hell.
“They almost got me, the damned…” Not finding the right word he huffed and puffed and finally grumbled, “Should we take them back to the base or would you rather head for Sadigosh?”
“Neither, Bertra. With the doctor, the nurse and this girl here being accomplices of these… two weird guys, some retaliation will have to be taken on Mishka.”
“That’s for sure!” the other sneered. “Especially since the old people also lied by keeping silent.”
“Therefore, we’re going to offer our Grand Marli Hyoky a great show! Go alert HQ at Sadigosh and explain the situation. I’ll bet they’ll ask Grand Marli Hyoky right away to do us the honor of attending the festivities in person.”
“And her?” Bertra nodded his arrogant head at Shora.
Rolansh shrugged and looked at Clark and Taylor. “Here’s what’ll happen to you two for running away.”
He calmly adjusted his weapon and aimed at the young woman. In horror she backed away a few steps and instinctively raised her trembling hands in imaginary protection. Rolansh pulled the trigger and the ultra-sonic beam spit out. The poor girl started screaming, howling, and fell backward. She balled up in the sand, her body convulsing terribly. The intensity of the beam grew so strong that her golden yellow smock was burned away, without a flame, scorching her skin. In the last throes of death she moaned and remained balled up on the ground. Her shriveled corpse was covered in gruesome blisters. It was nothing but a pile of flesh whose cells exploded under the ultra-sonic vibrations.
“Bastards!” Clark clenched his jaws in hate and moved to jump on the monster.
Bertra shot a weak discharge at him that stopped him in his tracks and made him groan in pain. “Take good care of them,” he said to the other as he headed to the triangular spaceship.
Fifteen minutes later he came back looking happy, his eyes glinting with ecstatic joy. “I spoke to the Grand Marli Hyoky himself!”
“You’re joking!” the chief pilot replied without taking his eyes off the prisoners.
“No, really. Grand Marli Hyoky was there inspecting the Communication Center in Sadigosh just when I called. So, he listened to my message personally and did me the honor of answering in person… and congratulating both of us warmly! A ship from HQ is bringing him here with the commander to raze Mishka to the ground and destroy the nasty vermin.”
“Well now, Bertra, I smell a promotion in the air.”
“The way Grand Marli Hyoky spoke, it wouldn’t surprise me at all,” he gloated.
Clark and Taylor looked at each other, stunned. They were truly in a tight spot, the worst in their lives that had, however, been full of danger.
Clark whispered something to his partner but Rolansh thundered, “If you need some information, ask out loud! And don’t even think about escaping! You’re far too precious to even think of bribing us to let you go…”
“And taking away your promotion,” Taylor sneered back.
“Exactly. You’ll have the honor of being interrogated by Marli Hyoky in person very soon. And if your explanations sound sincere to him, you can hope for his mercy.”
“Yeah,” Bertra smiled cynically. “You’ll die a good death choosing whatever way seems nicest to you… In fact, where do you come from?” he suddenly asked. “Are you Polarians?”
“Earthlings,” Taylor answered, forcing himself to stay calm.
“Earthlings? And you want us to believe that rebels could have built a ship like this in secret?” he pointed his thumb at the helicopter.
“There they are!” Bertra shouted, ignoring their captives’ response.
In the sky, coming from the west, a huge triangular spaceship around 250 feet per side was heading toward Mishka. The sunlight sparkled off its aluminum-colored armor, giving it a blinding brilliance. On the bottom were numerous concave windows. Three rectangular plates slid open to reveal the double wheels with huge green tires. When the landing gear was out the giant ship veered off and came back with a low rumble to land and roll to a stop only 50 yards away.
Next to this colossus the triangular patrol ship and the oval helicopter looked like toys sitting in its pointed shadow. A ramp with handrails came slowly down and a man appeared in the ventral hatch—a fat man with brown hair, pale skin, draped majestically in a kind of pure white fur decorated with gold embroidery and precious gems, red, green, blue, purple and black. He walked slowly down the ramp followed at a distance by ten men in richly embroidered yellow tunics. The commander’s red uniform clashed harshly with the formal attire of the dignitaries.
Marli Hyoky, dictator of Earth, stopped 15 feet away from the captives flanked by the two guards. Rolansh, trembling with emotion before the Supreme Chief, bowed low. He accompanied this servile gesture with a great sweep of his right arm, bringing it to his heart to show his loyalty. He stayed bent over with his head lowered. Bertra was alarmed to see that the prisoners—the height of insolence—stood up straight, mocking His Greatness! With a hard punch to their backs he forced them down, “Bow down, you dogs!”
; Taylor and Clark obeyed reluctantly and imitating their guards they bowed and brought their right hand humbly to their chest… in order to slip their hands onto the butt of their disintegrator pistols.
Marli Hyoky approached the two guards and ordered, “Stand up, Guards. You have accomplished an incredible feat that you will be rewarded for. Now get this vermin up,” he pointed a foot at the captives bent over.
Without even looking at each other the two prisoners jumped forward and stuck their disintegrators in the dictator’s belly. Completely stunned, he opened his mouth as if he suddenly could not breathe. Clark spun around and shot just as the guards got over their surprise and were about to fire. There were two blinding flashes and their bodies disappeared, vanished in the rays.
The dignitaries of the escort, 30 feet away, started running at them but Clark was already turning his disintegrator back on them. More blinding flashes and high-pitched whistles and one by one the tyrant’s henchmen were changed into bright beams of light.
“And there’s more for you,” Commander Taylor growled, digging his weapon into the dictator’s back. “Walk, hands in the air.”
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” his voice boomed.
“No need to bark like that, we’re not deaf,” Clark told him.
“It’s… it’s for the machine guns,” he stammered pitifully.
“Do you think they’ll fire without your order?” Clark asked ironically. “They’d be too afraid of hitting your fat.”
Being careful to keep their hostage between them and the firing line of the ship’s guns, they headed quickly toward the helicopter. Clark rushed to the commands while Taylor, with a few well-placed kicks, forced the dictator to climb into the hold. He closed the armored hatch, activated the magnetic locks and joined his partner.
“Okay, Rudy, let’s go!”
The helicopter shot up and headed for the Anza Desert. Clark turned on the viewer and shined a beam in front of the copter so they could see the Retrotimeship sitting invisible on the ground. After flying over the Salton Sea, whose blue water glimmered weakly in the fading sunlight, they were again over dry land. The screen soon showed the bulk of the Retrotimeship, unseen by the naked eye.
“Speed up, Clark. The Triangle is following us.”
“No worries that it’ll shoot, Commander. The guns wouldn’t dare fire with their venerable master with us.”
He typed on the keyboard linked to the Retrotimeship and the big ramp opened up. The oval helicopter came straight down and “floated” onto the carriage that showed up on the screen. Then the carriage slid up the metal ramp and stopped in the hold. The big hatch closed automatically.
The precious hostage, threatened by the disintegrators, entered the rear hold whose doors closed right away. He banged on the steel walls, shouted, ranted and pleaded. His barely audible voice was heard like a whisper by the two officers.
“Let me out! You will be free! I’ll shower you with gold!”
Taylor walked up to the door and shouted back, “A little more patience and you’ll get out!”
A minute later and the invisible Retrotimeship shot into the purple desert sky as the triangular ship was circling over the area. Its pilots were flabbergasted, wondering how the kidnappers could have just vanished right under their noses. The RT2 was staying only 50 yards over the flying triangle and flying at the same speed. Rudy Clark pressed a button and the hatch of the rear hold opened.
Marli Hyoky, cried out in terror when he felt the metal floor opening under his feet. He dropped like a stone and crashed onto the spaceship.
The RT2 sped off, accelerating through the atmospheric layers to come out into the darkness of outer space where its gravito-magnetic rockets were turned off. At the controls of the time travel mechanism Mark Taylor made a quick mental calculation while working the electronic keyboard.
“We’re here in 1378 of the Age of Vrish-Ju, the Messenger of Good. If Avshton was accurate, then Kariven and his friends came into the Past around 2,200 years ago, or 822 years before Vrish-Ju.”
He entered the numbers and flipped a switch.
“I hope Tradition wasn’t wrong about the dates.”
A quiet rumbling vibrated the Retrotimeship. The star-studded space around them turned gray, an opaque gray, with fleeting areas of light, then in a split second the stars were back.
“We should be there,” Taylor said, leaving the gravito-magnetic controls to his co-pilot.
The RT2 tilted and headed for Earth to straightened out later and fly horizontally after penetrating the atmospheric layers. It came farther down and on the horizon the pilots saw the west coast of France. Clark was as nervous as his chief when they set course for Paris or rather the area where the city would be later, much later. At reduced speed they came down and stopped over the future valley of Chevreuse, almost exactly where they would find a future Guyancourt.
“There!” Mark Taylor’s eyes opened wide as he pointed at an oblong shape in a clearing. “The… the RT1 of Harrington and Streiler!”
Indeed, the tarnished metal rocketship was sitting there, the brother of their own ship but a very worn-out brother, corroded by bad weather. A few miles to the south, in the middle of a wide clearing in the forest, stood a group of wooden and stone houses lined with streets and two big squares.
Seeing that Clark was about to land, Taylor stopped him. “No, it’s too late now. Just to be sure let’s try to send a message without landing.”
“RT2 calling RT1. RT2 calling RT1.”
A few minutes later the speaker crackled and a trembling, stuttering voice answered, “RT1 to RT2… Lord almighty! Kariven here!”
“Good God,” Clark murmured with tears in his eyes. “Kariven! Rudy Clark here with Commander Taylor! I don’t see you. Is your viewer broken?”
“For 17 years, Rudy,” the anthropologist’s voice trembled, weak and old, broken but gentle. “Only the radio works thanks to an emergency generator that we feed with a little badly refined fuel—very badly. My God,” he sighed, “We lost all hope a long time ago. And here you are, Rudy, and good old Taylor… Old? Certainly not as old as I am, of course. You can’t see me, Rudy, but you can tell how much I’ve changed by the sound of my voice. 49 years we’ve been here, free but prisoners of the Past.”
“49 years!” Commander Taylor whispered. “And… the others, Kariven?”
“The others?” Kariven’s quaky voice stammered. “There’s only three of us now. Angelvin, Doniatchka and me. The others died a long time ago. Yuln… seven years ago, killed in an explosion of a boiler being built for our Celtic friends.”
“You came here… how long ago exactly? Think carefully, Kariven,” Clark was almost begging.
“I’ve counted the days, Rudy, and I don’t need to think about it. We got here 49 years, seven months and 13 days ago, around ten at night… with a fog from hell.”
There was a bitter little laugh and he added, as if to himself, “Bad weather, Rudy, like you’ve never seen in New York or Frisco, truly!”
But Rudy was no longer listening. He had launched the Retrotimeship into the sky and stopped when it was in outer space. Taylor swiftly changed the numbers on the keyboard using the ones that… old man Kariven had just given and a few minutes later the ship was coming back down to Earth, an Earth 49 years, seven months and 13 days younger. Flying over the same area they quickly spotted the shiny ship, radiant in the first rays of the rising sun that was slowly dissipating the morning fog. The RT2 landed silently around 50 yards from its twin brother and the pilots ran down the metal stairs… just when Kariven, Dormoy, Angelvin and their charming wives were stepping down theirs, followed by the engineer Leconte.
“Clark! Taylor!” they shouted in surprise.
One minute later they were hugging one another, giving slaps on the back and friendly pokes in the ribs.
Stupefied, Doniatchka grabbed Commander Taylor by the shoulders. “But… you’re crying, Mark. And Rudy, too. But we’ve only been gone a
few days.”
“Did you already lose all hope of finding us?” Kariven asked.
Taylor quickly wiped away his tears, embarrassed, and forced himself to smile while speaking in a hoarse voice. “Don’t accuse us of being too sensitive, kids. Pack your bags and climb into the RT2 right away. We’re heading back to the Present… or to the Future as it were.”
“But… we can’t abandon the RT1,” Kariven said. “Harrington and Streiler, who are resting at the moment, will get it fixed soon enough.”
Clark shook his head, “Forget it, Kariven. The RT1 can’t be fixed… here. You’ll never get it up and running.”
“Never?” Yuln repeated, probing the minds of the two pilots. All of a sudden she turned pale, shivered and grabbed her husband’s arm. “Oh dear,” she whispered, scared by the thoughts she had just picked up. “Mark and Rudy are right. Let’s not stay here one minute longer. Go wake up Kurt and Red.”
While the anthropologist, baffled, went to wake up the two physicists, Dormoy, as troubled as his friends, realized that he had not introduced Leconte to the two officers.
Less than an hour later the castaways of Time, all of them dazed by the hasty departure that felt more like an escape, were together in the cockpit of the RT2. Staring out the concave window of the cockpit they watched sadly as the shiny form of the first Retrotimeship got farther away, abandoned temporarily.
The countryside got gradually farther away, this countryside where the slavery of the human race by a long line of tyrannical despots almost took place. Under the greenery of the forest the frightened Celts, clutching the handles of their big iron swords, crouched down in the high grass. They watched on fearfully as the fantastic “iron bird” soared off and disappeared forever with the demi-gods who would never come back to drag them out of their crude lives.
