Collected Short Fiction, page 294
Meantime, through the high north windows, I could see the fire-banded spheroids of the Saturnians flying against the stars, searching. I had begun to hope that they would not discover us. But their awesome baying came suddenly near.
A glass beaker dropped from Carol’s fingers.
“Look!” she gasped. “Oh, Ron, it is—he!”
She had pointed, and I saw one of the monsters drop past the window. Standing upon its black-scaled body was the gaunt tremendous figure of Mawson Kroll.
In a few moments there was a pounding at the door, and Kroll’s harsh voice demanded:
“Come out, Dunbar—or die.”
Still obeying the bodiless voice of Merry Bell, I took a flask from a steaming water bath, poured its black contents into a filter. Slow brown drops began to fall, one by one, into a test-tube beneath.
Carol touched my arm. Her lovely face had drained white. Voiceless with dread, again she pointed.
A greenish mist had gathered about the locked door. It thickened, obscured the metal panels—as once I had seen the same green mist hide the wreck of a plane on the polar ice. It settled. It was gone.
And a vast ragged opening yawned in the wall, where the door had been!
Through it swept a black, monstrous spheroid. Blazing above its belt of purple fire was the green triangular eye whose annihilating ray had destroyed the door.
Beneath it stalked the tall gaunt body that had been Doctor Harding’s, the black dissimilar eyes of Mawson Kroll burning from its leering face with a light of hellish triumph.
“Well, Dunbar,” rasped that hideously altered voice. “Die——”
A lean commanding arm lifted to that creature we had called the Watcher, and the Cyclopean eye bent its green destroying stare upon us.
But then the voice of Merry Bell spoke again, soundless, yet more arresting than any sound I ever heard:
“Mawson Kroll, you killed a million with this thing you stole. You killed me with it, more terribly. You have turned another discovery of mine against all the world. Therefore, this thing I do is just.”
Suddenly, as that dread voice spoke, I remembered a long-past afternoon in this same room, when Merry Bell had showed me—before the staring eyes of Mawson Kroll—the few brown drops of his deadly bacteriophage.
“Yes, Ron,” that still voice told me, so much swifter than audible speech, “this is the bacteriophage.” Then its command was desperately urgent: “Throw the tube!”
For already in Kroll’s hand was the black projector of the stasis ray. Its pale magenta beam flickered out, probed my body with its terrible chill. My last act of consciousness was the effort to hurl that test-tube straight at Mawson Kroll. But I did not know if the impulse ever reached my fingers, for darkness came down like a toppling mountain.
AWARENESS came back, as always, slowly. And while I hung in that queer state of timeless suspension, there happened one of the strangest things of all. I had been alone in the darkness, but two bright figures came slowly into being before me.
Merry Bell came toward me—transfigured! Unencumbered, his tall body looked youthful and straight. His lean face wore a smile that I had not seen for many years. In his blue eyes was serenity, ineffable, complete.
Beside him was—Maru-Mora!
Golden queen of elf-land, flying in an opalescent shell. Her white pointed face, beneath yellow carapace and scarlet crest, was radiantly alight. Her great purple eyes were warm with a supernal joy, all their agony gone. One slender arm, golden-furred, reached over the shell’s bright lip. And her tiny seven-fingered hand held the hand of Merry Bell.
Terribly, in the darkness, I struggled to speak. I could not, but Merry Bell seemed to sense the question that burned in me, and he answered:
“You moved in time, Ron. The bacteriophage splashed Kroll and the Watcher. And the Seeker’s knowledge had gone into it, with mine; it was a thousand times more swift and deadly than the old.
“Kroll perished where he stood—I am glad that you and Carol did not see. And Doctor Harding’s body can be desecrated no longer.
“But the Watcher, before it died, carried death back to the rest. Seeking safety, they drove the ship back into space. But the virus was a passenger. Now the ship is an empty hulk, drifting on an eternal orbit that will carry it for ever around the earth like a second moon—and still it carries Maru-Mora’s treasure.
“The virus, before it expired, swept the city. It penetrated the deepest burrow. It destroyed every living thing in the vicinity—all except those held in the safety of the stasis ray.
“Now the menace is ended. The Sleepers are dead. We are ready to lift the stasis and let the world go on—but little harmed by the horror that passed while it slept.”
Tears shone in Bell’s clear eyes.
“All my guilt is absolved, Ron. My old debt is paid. Now I can go ahead. Thank you, Ron. And good-bye.”
Beside him in the darkness, Maru-Mora’s tiny face seemed almost to smile. From crimson lips came the eery music of her piping.
“She says farewell,” Bell told me. “To you, and to Carol.”
The darkness around them, suddenly, was no longer black but purple. I saw that they were in the crystal depths of that purple pylon, on the summit beyond the pole. And they fled away from me, into infinite distance.
Then I woke up in the laboratory. My right hand finished an over-arm sweep—the arrested gesture that had hurled the deadly tube. The force of it carried me around, and I saw Carol, waking. It was odd to watch her lovely face change from frozen horror to swift, incredulous delight.
“Ron!” she whispered eagerly. “You saw them, too? You heard them—Doctor Bell and Maru-Mora?”
Little need to speak. She came into my arms, and I kissed her. It was good to feel the supple warmth of her body, when it had been so stiff and cold; good to feel the tremulous softness of her lips, when they had been diamond-hard.
We came out of the half-demolished laboratory, into a winter’s dawn.
Northward, upon the Palisades, we found a strange broad circle of desolation, from which the bacteriophage had obliterated all life. Piled in the center of it were low crumbling mounds of clay, where the hideous city had stood.
But beyond that circle of doom, and all about us, was a world alive again. The south wind was warm as spring. Noisy larks soared on it, unconcerned, to greet the belated sun. The distant humming of bewildered New York was a vast and comforting sound.
The great silence was ended.
Carol took my hand like an eager child, and we walked toward the golden towers of the city awake in the dawn.
[THE END]
The Legion of Time
Two women of two mutually exclusive possible futures seek to enlist the aid of a man of the present—by demanding his death!
A great MUTANT story presenting a New Concept of time travel.
THE beginning of it for Dennis Lanning—the very beginning of his life—was on a hushed April evening of 1927. Then eighteen, Lanning was slender, small-featured, with straw-yellow hair which usually stood on end. He commonly wore a half-diffident smile—but his gray eyes could light with a fighting glint, and his wiry body held a quick and unsuspected strength.
In that beginning was the same fantastic contrast that ran through the whole adventure: the mingling of everyday reality with the stark Inexplicable.
Lanning, that last term, shared a Cambridge apartment with three other Harvard seniors, all a little older than he. Wilmot McLan, the mathematician, was a slight man, grave and reticent, already absorbed in his work. Quietly cheerful, studious Lao Meng Shan, proud son of a mandarin of Szechwan, was eagerly drinking in the wonders of modern engineering. Good friends and swell fellows both. But the one who stood always closest to Lanning was Barry Halloran.
Gigantic red-haired all-American tackle, Barry was, first and last, a fighter. Some stern, bright spirit of eternal rebellion he and Lanning shared in common. Companions in everything, they had been taking flying lessons together at the East Boston airport.
The other three were out, however, on this drowsy Sunday evening, and the house was still. Lanning sat alone in his room, reading a thin little gray-bound book. The flyleaf was inscribed, “To Denny, from Wil—a stitch in Time!” It was Wil McLan’s first scientific work (which he had just published at his own expense) entitled, Reality and Change: The Nature of Time.
Deep-hidden in its abstruse mathematics, Lanning had sensed an exciting meaning. He leaned back, with tired eyes closed, trying to complete the tantalizing picture he had glimpsed through the mist of symbols on the page. The book began with Minkowski’s famous dictum: “Space in itself, and Time in itself, sink to mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two retains an independent existence.”
Was Time, then, but another extension of the universe; to-morrow as real as yesterday? What if one could leap forward——?
“Denny Lanning!”
A clear silvery voice had spoken his name. Dropping the book, he sat upright in his chair. He blinked, swallowed. A queer little shudder went up and down his spine. The door was still closed, and there had been no other sound. But a woman was standing before him on the rug.
A plain white robe swept long to her feet. Her hair, a glowing mahogany-red, was held back with a blue, brilliant band like a halo. The composure of her perfect, classic face was almost stern. But, behind it, Lanning felt agony.
Before her, in two small hands, she held a thing about the size and shape of a football—but shimmering with splendid prismatic flame, like a colossal, many-faceted diamond.
HER GRAVE EYES were on Lanning. They were wide, violet. Something in their depths—a haunting dread, a piercing, hopeless longing—choked him with emotion, dimmed his eyes. Then amazement came back, and he stumbled to his feet.
“Hello!” he gasped. “Yes, I’m Denny Lanning. But who are you?” His glance went to the locked door behind her. “How’d you get inside?”
A grave smile lit the white cameo of her face.
“I am Lethonee,” she said. Her voice, Lanning noticed, had an unfamiliar musical rhythm. “And I am not really in your room, but in my own city of Jonbar. It is only in your mind that we meet, through the chronotron,”—her eyes dropped briefly to the immense flashing gem—“and only your study of Time made possible this complete rapport.”
Open-mouthed, Lanning was drinking in the slim, clean youth of her, the glory of her hair, her calm, deep loveliness that was like an inner light.
“Lethonee——” he murmured, relishing the sound. “Lethonee—— Dream or not, you are beautiful!”
A quick little smile, pleased and tender, rewarded him. But instantly it was gone, before the deep solemnity of trouble.
“I have come a long way to find you, Denny Lanning,” she said. “I have crossed a gulf more terrible than death. Will you help me?”
A queer, trembling eagerness had seized him. Incredulity struggled with a breathless hope. A throbbing ache was in his throat, so that he couldn’t speak. He walked uncertainly to her, and tried to touch the slim bare arms that held the great jewel. His quivering fingers met nothing but air.
“I’ll help you, Lethonee,” he gulped at last. “But how can I?”
Her silver voice sank to a low, urgent tone. From the startling whiteness of her face, the great, violet eyes seemed to look far beyond the room.
“Because destiny has chosen you, Denny Lanning. The fate of the human race is on your shoulders. My own life is in your hand—and the doom of Jonbar!”
“Eh!” Lanning muttered. “How’s that?” He rubbed his forehead, bewilderedly. “Where’s Jonbar?”
His wondering dread increased when the girl said: “Look into the chronotron, and I can show you Jonbar.”
She lifted the great flashing jewel, holding, its ends in her two small hands. Her eyes dropped to it. Colored rays shattered from it, blindingly. It exploded into a prismatic glare. The fire-mist slowly cleared, and he saw—Jonbar!
The lofty, graceful pylons of it would have dwarfed the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Of shimmering, silvery metal, they were set immensely far apart, among green park-lands and broad, many-leveled roadways. Great white ships, teardrop-shaped, slipped through the air above them.
“That is my Jonbar, where I am,” the girl said softly. “Now let me show you the city that may be—New Jonbar—lying far-off in the mists of futurity.”
BRIGHT FLAME veiled the city, and vanished again. And Lanning saw another wondrous metropolis. The green hills along the horizon were the same. But the towers were taller, farther apart. And they shone with clean brilliant colors, against the wooded parks. The city was one artistic whole; a single stupendous jewel whose beauty caught Lanning’s breath.
A reverent awe was in the girl’s voice when she whispered: “New Jonbar! Its people are the dynon.”
There were fewer ships in the air. But Lanning now saw tiny figures, clad it seemed in robes of pure, bright flame, launching themselves from lofty roofs and terraces, soaring above the parks in perfect, wingless freedom.
“They fly through adaptation to the power of the dynat,” breathed the girl. “It makes them near immortal, almost—godlike! They are the perfect race to come.”
Prismatic flame hid the vision. The girl lowered the crystal in her hands. Lanning stepped back. He blinked bewilderedly at the reading lamp, his books, the chair behind him. From that old, comforting reality, he looked back to the girl’s white wonder.
He spoke again, diffidently: “Lethonee—— Tell me, are you real?”
“I am real as Jonbar is.” Her voice was hushed and solemn. “You hold our destiny—to. give us life or death. That is a truth already fixed in the frame of Space and Time.”
“What—” Lanning gulped, “what can I do?”
Dread was a shadow in her eyes.
“I don’t know. The deed is dim in the flux of time. But you may strike for Jonbar—if you will. To win or to perish! I came to warn you of those who will seek to destroy you—and, through you, Jonbar.”
The rhythm of her voice was almost a chant, a prophecy of evil.
“There is the dark, resistless power of the gyrane, and black Glarath, the priest of its murderous horror. There are the monstrous hordes of the kothrin, and their savage commander, Sorainya.”
The white beauty of Lethonee had become almost stern. A sorrow darkened her eyes, yet they flashed with a deathless hatred.
“She is the greatest peril.” It was a battle-chant. “Sorainya, the Woman of War! She is the evil flower of Gyronchi. And she must be destroyed.”
Her voice fell, and Lethonee looked at Lanning over the giant crystal, her eyes full of a tender and almost childish concern.
“Or,” she finished, “she will destroy you, Denny.”
Lanning looked at her a long time.
At last, hoarse with wonder, he said: “Whatever is going to happen, I’m willing to help—if I can. Because you are—beautiful. But still—what, exactly, am I expected to do?”
The words almost crackled from Lethonee’s lips: “Beware of Sorainya!” Then, her rhythmic voice once more soft and musical, “Denny, make me one promise. Promise me that you will not fly to-morrow.”
“But I’m going to!” Lanning cried. “Max—he’s the instructor—said that Barry and I could solo to-morrow, if the weather’s right. I couldn’t miss it.”
“You must,” said Lethonee. “Or Jonbar will be slain!”
Lanning met her violet eyes. Emotion had burned away some barrier. He looked into her very soul—and found it beautiful.
“I promise,” he whispered. “I’ll not fly.”
“Thank you, Denny.” Her smile set a throbbing ache in his throat. “Now I must go.”
“No!” Alarm tore Lanning’s heart. “I don’t know half enough. Where you are, really. Or how I could find you again. Don’t go!”
“But I must.” Dread clouded her face again. “For Sorainya might follow me here. And if she finds that the crisis turns indeed on you, she will strive to take you—yes, destroy you! I know Sorainya.”
“But——” Lanning gulped. “But—will I see you again?”
“It is your hand on the wheel of time,” the girl said gravely, “and not mine. Good-by, Denny.”
“But wait!” gasped Lanning. “I must tell you! I——”
But the fire of a million sunlit prisms had burst again from the jewel in her hands. Lanning was momentarily dazzled, blinded. Then, blinking, he found himself alone in the room, speaking to vacant air.
DREAM—or reality? The question racked him. Could she have been an actual person, come across the gulf of time from the remote, possible future? Or was he going crazy?
Dazed, he picked up the little gray book, and reread a paragraph of Wil McLan’s: “To an external observer gifted with four-dimensional senses, our quadraxial universe must appear complete, fixed, and forever unchanging. The sweep of Time is no more than the hand of a subjective watch; it is no more than the intangible ray of consciousness, illuminating human experience. In any absolute sense, the events of yesterday and to-morrow are alike eternal as the structure of space itself.”
But the white, troubled beauty of Lethonee rose against the page. How did that fit with her tale of worlds that might be?
He flung aside the book, helped himself to a generous slug of Barry Halloran’s pre-war Irish whisky, and walked blindly down through Harvard Square. It was after three when at last he came in to bed, and then he slept with a dream of Lethonee.
He wanted to tell Barry, in the morning, for they had been closer than brothers. But he thought the big redhead would only laugh—as he himself might have laughed if another had told him the thing. And he didn’t want laughter at his dream of Lethonee—not even from Barry.
Half sick with a confusion of wonder and doubt, of hopeless hope for another glimpse of her, and bitter dread that she had been all illusion, Lanning waited for the fatal hour.
“Buck up, kid!” Barry boomed at him, heartily. “I never thought you’d be shaky—Max says you’ve got the nerves of a hawk. I’m the one that should be turning green around the gills. Come out of it, and let’s go catch some sparrows!”
A glass beaker dropped from Carol’s fingers.
“Look!” she gasped. “Oh, Ron, it is—he!”
She had pointed, and I saw one of the monsters drop past the window. Standing upon its black-scaled body was the gaunt tremendous figure of Mawson Kroll.
In a few moments there was a pounding at the door, and Kroll’s harsh voice demanded:
“Come out, Dunbar—or die.”
Still obeying the bodiless voice of Merry Bell, I took a flask from a steaming water bath, poured its black contents into a filter. Slow brown drops began to fall, one by one, into a test-tube beneath.
Carol touched my arm. Her lovely face had drained white. Voiceless with dread, again she pointed.
A greenish mist had gathered about the locked door. It thickened, obscured the metal panels—as once I had seen the same green mist hide the wreck of a plane on the polar ice. It settled. It was gone.
And a vast ragged opening yawned in the wall, where the door had been!
Through it swept a black, monstrous spheroid. Blazing above its belt of purple fire was the green triangular eye whose annihilating ray had destroyed the door.
Beneath it stalked the tall gaunt body that had been Doctor Harding’s, the black dissimilar eyes of Mawson Kroll burning from its leering face with a light of hellish triumph.
“Well, Dunbar,” rasped that hideously altered voice. “Die——”
A lean commanding arm lifted to that creature we had called the Watcher, and the Cyclopean eye bent its green destroying stare upon us.
But then the voice of Merry Bell spoke again, soundless, yet more arresting than any sound I ever heard:
“Mawson Kroll, you killed a million with this thing you stole. You killed me with it, more terribly. You have turned another discovery of mine against all the world. Therefore, this thing I do is just.”
Suddenly, as that dread voice spoke, I remembered a long-past afternoon in this same room, when Merry Bell had showed me—before the staring eyes of Mawson Kroll—the few brown drops of his deadly bacteriophage.
“Yes, Ron,” that still voice told me, so much swifter than audible speech, “this is the bacteriophage.” Then its command was desperately urgent: “Throw the tube!”
For already in Kroll’s hand was the black projector of the stasis ray. Its pale magenta beam flickered out, probed my body with its terrible chill. My last act of consciousness was the effort to hurl that test-tube straight at Mawson Kroll. But I did not know if the impulse ever reached my fingers, for darkness came down like a toppling mountain.
AWARENESS came back, as always, slowly. And while I hung in that queer state of timeless suspension, there happened one of the strangest things of all. I had been alone in the darkness, but two bright figures came slowly into being before me.
Merry Bell came toward me—transfigured! Unencumbered, his tall body looked youthful and straight. His lean face wore a smile that I had not seen for many years. In his blue eyes was serenity, ineffable, complete.
Beside him was—Maru-Mora!
Golden queen of elf-land, flying in an opalescent shell. Her white pointed face, beneath yellow carapace and scarlet crest, was radiantly alight. Her great purple eyes were warm with a supernal joy, all their agony gone. One slender arm, golden-furred, reached over the shell’s bright lip. And her tiny seven-fingered hand held the hand of Merry Bell.
Terribly, in the darkness, I struggled to speak. I could not, but Merry Bell seemed to sense the question that burned in me, and he answered:
“You moved in time, Ron. The bacteriophage splashed Kroll and the Watcher. And the Seeker’s knowledge had gone into it, with mine; it was a thousand times more swift and deadly than the old.
“Kroll perished where he stood—I am glad that you and Carol did not see. And Doctor Harding’s body can be desecrated no longer.
“But the Watcher, before it died, carried death back to the rest. Seeking safety, they drove the ship back into space. But the virus was a passenger. Now the ship is an empty hulk, drifting on an eternal orbit that will carry it for ever around the earth like a second moon—and still it carries Maru-Mora’s treasure.
“The virus, before it expired, swept the city. It penetrated the deepest burrow. It destroyed every living thing in the vicinity—all except those held in the safety of the stasis ray.
“Now the menace is ended. The Sleepers are dead. We are ready to lift the stasis and let the world go on—but little harmed by the horror that passed while it slept.”
Tears shone in Bell’s clear eyes.
“All my guilt is absolved, Ron. My old debt is paid. Now I can go ahead. Thank you, Ron. And good-bye.”
Beside him in the darkness, Maru-Mora’s tiny face seemed almost to smile. From crimson lips came the eery music of her piping.
“She says farewell,” Bell told me. “To you, and to Carol.”
The darkness around them, suddenly, was no longer black but purple. I saw that they were in the crystal depths of that purple pylon, on the summit beyond the pole. And they fled away from me, into infinite distance.
Then I woke up in the laboratory. My right hand finished an over-arm sweep—the arrested gesture that had hurled the deadly tube. The force of it carried me around, and I saw Carol, waking. It was odd to watch her lovely face change from frozen horror to swift, incredulous delight.
“Ron!” she whispered eagerly. “You saw them, too? You heard them—Doctor Bell and Maru-Mora?”
Little need to speak. She came into my arms, and I kissed her. It was good to feel the supple warmth of her body, when it had been so stiff and cold; good to feel the tremulous softness of her lips, when they had been diamond-hard.
We came out of the half-demolished laboratory, into a winter’s dawn.
Northward, upon the Palisades, we found a strange broad circle of desolation, from which the bacteriophage had obliterated all life. Piled in the center of it were low crumbling mounds of clay, where the hideous city had stood.
But beyond that circle of doom, and all about us, was a world alive again. The south wind was warm as spring. Noisy larks soared on it, unconcerned, to greet the belated sun. The distant humming of bewildered New York was a vast and comforting sound.
The great silence was ended.
Carol took my hand like an eager child, and we walked toward the golden towers of the city awake in the dawn.
[THE END]
The Legion of Time
Two women of two mutually exclusive possible futures seek to enlist the aid of a man of the present—by demanding his death!
A great MUTANT story presenting a New Concept of time travel.
THE beginning of it for Dennis Lanning—the very beginning of his life—was on a hushed April evening of 1927. Then eighteen, Lanning was slender, small-featured, with straw-yellow hair which usually stood on end. He commonly wore a half-diffident smile—but his gray eyes could light with a fighting glint, and his wiry body held a quick and unsuspected strength.
In that beginning was the same fantastic contrast that ran through the whole adventure: the mingling of everyday reality with the stark Inexplicable.
Lanning, that last term, shared a Cambridge apartment with three other Harvard seniors, all a little older than he. Wilmot McLan, the mathematician, was a slight man, grave and reticent, already absorbed in his work. Quietly cheerful, studious Lao Meng Shan, proud son of a mandarin of Szechwan, was eagerly drinking in the wonders of modern engineering. Good friends and swell fellows both. But the one who stood always closest to Lanning was Barry Halloran.
Gigantic red-haired all-American tackle, Barry was, first and last, a fighter. Some stern, bright spirit of eternal rebellion he and Lanning shared in common. Companions in everything, they had been taking flying lessons together at the East Boston airport.
The other three were out, however, on this drowsy Sunday evening, and the house was still. Lanning sat alone in his room, reading a thin little gray-bound book. The flyleaf was inscribed, “To Denny, from Wil—a stitch in Time!” It was Wil McLan’s first scientific work (which he had just published at his own expense) entitled, Reality and Change: The Nature of Time.
Deep-hidden in its abstruse mathematics, Lanning had sensed an exciting meaning. He leaned back, with tired eyes closed, trying to complete the tantalizing picture he had glimpsed through the mist of symbols on the page. The book began with Minkowski’s famous dictum: “Space in itself, and Time in itself, sink to mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two retains an independent existence.”
Was Time, then, but another extension of the universe; to-morrow as real as yesterday? What if one could leap forward——?
“Denny Lanning!”
A clear silvery voice had spoken his name. Dropping the book, he sat upright in his chair. He blinked, swallowed. A queer little shudder went up and down his spine. The door was still closed, and there had been no other sound. But a woman was standing before him on the rug.
A plain white robe swept long to her feet. Her hair, a glowing mahogany-red, was held back with a blue, brilliant band like a halo. The composure of her perfect, classic face was almost stern. But, behind it, Lanning felt agony.
Before her, in two small hands, she held a thing about the size and shape of a football—but shimmering with splendid prismatic flame, like a colossal, many-faceted diamond.
HER GRAVE EYES were on Lanning. They were wide, violet. Something in their depths—a haunting dread, a piercing, hopeless longing—choked him with emotion, dimmed his eyes. Then amazement came back, and he stumbled to his feet.
“Hello!” he gasped. “Yes, I’m Denny Lanning. But who are you?” His glance went to the locked door behind her. “How’d you get inside?”
A grave smile lit the white cameo of her face.
“I am Lethonee,” she said. Her voice, Lanning noticed, had an unfamiliar musical rhythm. “And I am not really in your room, but in my own city of Jonbar. It is only in your mind that we meet, through the chronotron,”—her eyes dropped briefly to the immense flashing gem—“and only your study of Time made possible this complete rapport.”
Open-mouthed, Lanning was drinking in the slim, clean youth of her, the glory of her hair, her calm, deep loveliness that was like an inner light.
“Lethonee——” he murmured, relishing the sound. “Lethonee—— Dream or not, you are beautiful!”
A quick little smile, pleased and tender, rewarded him. But instantly it was gone, before the deep solemnity of trouble.
“I have come a long way to find you, Denny Lanning,” she said. “I have crossed a gulf more terrible than death. Will you help me?”
A queer, trembling eagerness had seized him. Incredulity struggled with a breathless hope. A throbbing ache was in his throat, so that he couldn’t speak. He walked uncertainly to her, and tried to touch the slim bare arms that held the great jewel. His quivering fingers met nothing but air.
“I’ll help you, Lethonee,” he gulped at last. “But how can I?”
Her silver voice sank to a low, urgent tone. From the startling whiteness of her face, the great, violet eyes seemed to look far beyond the room.
“Because destiny has chosen you, Denny Lanning. The fate of the human race is on your shoulders. My own life is in your hand—and the doom of Jonbar!”
“Eh!” Lanning muttered. “How’s that?” He rubbed his forehead, bewilderedly. “Where’s Jonbar?”
His wondering dread increased when the girl said: “Look into the chronotron, and I can show you Jonbar.”
She lifted the great flashing jewel, holding, its ends in her two small hands. Her eyes dropped to it. Colored rays shattered from it, blindingly. It exploded into a prismatic glare. The fire-mist slowly cleared, and he saw—Jonbar!
The lofty, graceful pylons of it would have dwarfed the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Of shimmering, silvery metal, they were set immensely far apart, among green park-lands and broad, many-leveled roadways. Great white ships, teardrop-shaped, slipped through the air above them.
“That is my Jonbar, where I am,” the girl said softly. “Now let me show you the city that may be—New Jonbar—lying far-off in the mists of futurity.”
BRIGHT FLAME veiled the city, and vanished again. And Lanning saw another wondrous metropolis. The green hills along the horizon were the same. But the towers were taller, farther apart. And they shone with clean brilliant colors, against the wooded parks. The city was one artistic whole; a single stupendous jewel whose beauty caught Lanning’s breath.
A reverent awe was in the girl’s voice when she whispered: “New Jonbar! Its people are the dynon.”
There were fewer ships in the air. But Lanning now saw tiny figures, clad it seemed in robes of pure, bright flame, launching themselves from lofty roofs and terraces, soaring above the parks in perfect, wingless freedom.
“They fly through adaptation to the power of the dynat,” breathed the girl. “It makes them near immortal, almost—godlike! They are the perfect race to come.”
Prismatic flame hid the vision. The girl lowered the crystal in her hands. Lanning stepped back. He blinked bewilderedly at the reading lamp, his books, the chair behind him. From that old, comforting reality, he looked back to the girl’s white wonder.
He spoke again, diffidently: “Lethonee—— Tell me, are you real?”
“I am real as Jonbar is.” Her voice was hushed and solemn. “You hold our destiny—to. give us life or death. That is a truth already fixed in the frame of Space and Time.”
“What—” Lanning gulped, “what can I do?”
Dread was a shadow in her eyes.
“I don’t know. The deed is dim in the flux of time. But you may strike for Jonbar—if you will. To win or to perish! I came to warn you of those who will seek to destroy you—and, through you, Jonbar.”
The rhythm of her voice was almost a chant, a prophecy of evil.
“There is the dark, resistless power of the gyrane, and black Glarath, the priest of its murderous horror. There are the monstrous hordes of the kothrin, and their savage commander, Sorainya.”
The white beauty of Lethonee had become almost stern. A sorrow darkened her eyes, yet they flashed with a deathless hatred.
“She is the greatest peril.” It was a battle-chant. “Sorainya, the Woman of War! She is the evil flower of Gyronchi. And she must be destroyed.”
Her voice fell, and Lethonee looked at Lanning over the giant crystal, her eyes full of a tender and almost childish concern.
“Or,” she finished, “she will destroy you, Denny.”
Lanning looked at her a long time.
At last, hoarse with wonder, he said: “Whatever is going to happen, I’m willing to help—if I can. Because you are—beautiful. But still—what, exactly, am I expected to do?”
The words almost crackled from Lethonee’s lips: “Beware of Sorainya!” Then, her rhythmic voice once more soft and musical, “Denny, make me one promise. Promise me that you will not fly to-morrow.”
“But I’m going to!” Lanning cried. “Max—he’s the instructor—said that Barry and I could solo to-morrow, if the weather’s right. I couldn’t miss it.”
“You must,” said Lethonee. “Or Jonbar will be slain!”
Lanning met her violet eyes. Emotion had burned away some barrier. He looked into her very soul—and found it beautiful.
“I promise,” he whispered. “I’ll not fly.”
“Thank you, Denny.” Her smile set a throbbing ache in his throat. “Now I must go.”
“No!” Alarm tore Lanning’s heart. “I don’t know half enough. Where you are, really. Or how I could find you again. Don’t go!”
“But I must.” Dread clouded her face again. “For Sorainya might follow me here. And if she finds that the crisis turns indeed on you, she will strive to take you—yes, destroy you! I know Sorainya.”
“But——” Lanning gulped. “But—will I see you again?”
“It is your hand on the wheel of time,” the girl said gravely, “and not mine. Good-by, Denny.”
“But wait!” gasped Lanning. “I must tell you! I——”
But the fire of a million sunlit prisms had burst again from the jewel in her hands. Lanning was momentarily dazzled, blinded. Then, blinking, he found himself alone in the room, speaking to vacant air.
DREAM—or reality? The question racked him. Could she have been an actual person, come across the gulf of time from the remote, possible future? Or was he going crazy?
Dazed, he picked up the little gray book, and reread a paragraph of Wil McLan’s: “To an external observer gifted with four-dimensional senses, our quadraxial universe must appear complete, fixed, and forever unchanging. The sweep of Time is no more than the hand of a subjective watch; it is no more than the intangible ray of consciousness, illuminating human experience. In any absolute sense, the events of yesterday and to-morrow are alike eternal as the structure of space itself.”
But the white, troubled beauty of Lethonee rose against the page. How did that fit with her tale of worlds that might be?
He flung aside the book, helped himself to a generous slug of Barry Halloran’s pre-war Irish whisky, and walked blindly down through Harvard Square. It was after three when at last he came in to bed, and then he slept with a dream of Lethonee.
He wanted to tell Barry, in the morning, for they had been closer than brothers. But he thought the big redhead would only laugh—as he himself might have laughed if another had told him the thing. And he didn’t want laughter at his dream of Lethonee—not even from Barry.
Half sick with a confusion of wonder and doubt, of hopeless hope for another glimpse of her, and bitter dread that she had been all illusion, Lanning waited for the fatal hour.
“Buck up, kid!” Barry boomed at him, heartily. “I never thought you’d be shaky—Max says you’ve got the nerves of a hawk. I’m the one that should be turning green around the gills. Come out of it, and let’s go catch some sparrows!”
