Collected Short Fiction, page 296
“I warned you, Denny Lanning!” All the indolence gone, her voice crackled brittle and sharp. “Take the side of that phantom of Jonbar, and you shall perish with her. I sought your strength. But Gyronchi can win without it.”
With a tigerish savagery, she whipped out the long golden needle of her sword.
“When we meet again, it shall be at war. Guard yourself!”
A savage foot stamped down, and she was gone.
THOSE TWO antagonistic women set many a problem that Lanning could not solve. If they were actual visitors from conflicting possible worlds of futurity, he had no evidence of it save his own tortured memory. Many a weary night, pondering the haunting riddle, he wondered if he were going insane.
But a package that presently came to him in Spain contained another thin little book from Wilmot McLan, now the holder of many degrees and professor of astrophysics at a small western university. Inscribed, “To Denny, from Wil—another stitch in Time, to repair my last.” The volume was entitled Probability and Determination.
One underlined introductory paragraph Lanning searched desperately for a relevant meaning:
“The future has been held to be as real as the past, no more different from it than right is from left, the only directional indicator being k; the constant correlating entropy and probability. But the new quantum mechanics, destroying the absolute function of cause and effect, must likewise annihilate that contention. There is no determination in small scale events; consequently the ‘certainties’ of the macroscopic world are at best merely statistical. And probability, in the unfolding future, must be substituted for determination. The elementary particles of the old physics—electrons, photons, etc.—may be retained, located probably in a continuum of five dimensions. But any consideration of this hyper-space-time continuum must take note of a conflicting infinitude of possible worlds, only one of which, at the intersection of their geodesics with the advancing plane of the present, can claim reality. It is this new outlook of which we attempt a mathematical examination.”
Conflicting—possible worlds!
Those words haunted Lanning. Here, at last, was light. Here, in his old friend, was a possible confidant—the one man who might understand, who might tell him whether Lethonee and Sorainya were miraculous visitors out of Time, or—insanity.
At once he wrote McLan, outlining his story and requesting an opinion. Delayed, doubtless, by the military censors, the letter at last came back from America, stamped Removed—Left no Address. An inquiry to the University authorities informed him that McLan had resigned to undertake private research, and that his whereabouts were unknown.
And Lanning groped his way along, through the dark hall of wars and years, to 1938. Lao Meng Shan’s cable found him at Lausanne, recuperating from the war in Spain, the splinter of a shell still aching in his knee. He was writing another book.
Turned philosopher, he was trying to analyze the trends of the world, to pick out the influences of good and evil. The resolution of those conflicting forces, so he believed, would either establish the new technological civilization—or hurl the race into martial doom.
“Denny, American friend,” the cable ran, “humanity needs you. Will fly for China?”
Direct action had been the only anodyne for Lanning’s tortured mind. And the newspapers, that day, stirred his blood with accounts of hundreds of women and children killed by ruthless aerial bombardment. Ignoring the stiffening pain in his knee, he abandoned the ancient problem of good and evil, flew to Cairo, and caught a fast steamer east.
IV.
WINGED DOOM was a whisper in the sky. Sirens moaned warning of the pei chee—“flying engines”. Hapless Hankow had been swiftly darkened, but already yellow bursts of ruin and death had flared above in the north and eastward along the river docks, where the first bombs fell.
Stop the raiders! was the frantic, hopeless order.
Limping in his game left leg, where bits of steel still made an excellent barometer of impending weather, Lanning stumbled across the field to the battered, antiquated American plane that jabbering mechanics had roaring in the line. The cool of midnight cleared the sleep from his head, and he shuddered to the drumming in the sky.
Lao Meng Shan, now his observer, was already beside the machine, dolefully shaking his watch. Solemnly, in habitual careful English, he shouted above roaring motors: “Our orders, tonight, are over-confident. For my watch stopped when the first bomb struck. That is a very bad omen.”
Lanning never laughed at superstition—few fliers do. But his lean face smiled in the darkness.
“Once, Shan,” he shouted in reply, “an ancient warrior named Joshua stopped the sun until his battle was won. Maybe that’s the omen. Let’s go!
Adjusting his helmet, the Chinese shrugged.
“I think it means that time is stopped for us. If it is written, however, that we must die for China——”
He clambered deliberately into the rear cockpit.
Lanning tried the controls, signaled the ground crew, and gunned the motor. The machine lifted toward the thrumming in the sky. The fact that most of the defending aircraft had been bombed into the ground on the day before, he thought grimly, was a more conclusive omen than the watch.
Darkness was a blanket on the city northward, hiding cowering millions. Troop lorries and fire trucks shrieked through the streets. Anti-aircraft batteries were hammering vainly. Probing searchlights flared against the white puffs of exploding shells, uselessly seeking the raiders.
Spiraling for altitude, Lanning narrowed gray eyes to search a thin cloud-wisp above. He winced to a yellow flare beneath. For his mind could see the toppling wreckage of a splendid modern city ruined, hear shrieks and groans and wailing cries for aid, even smell the sharp odor of searing human flesh. His body tensed, and he fired a warming burst from twin guns.
The wraith of frozen mist was at last beside them. It burned white, abruptly, in the glare of a searchlight. And a dark bomber dropped out of it, swaying between the gray mushrooms of shells.
Lanning tipped the ancient plane after it, into a power dive. Shan, open-mouthed, yelling, waved cheerfully. Their machine guns clattered. The bomber swerved, and defending guns flickered red. But Lanning held his sights on it, grimly. Black smoke erupted from it suddenly, and it toppled downward.
One——
HE WAS pulling up the battered ship—gingerly—when a roving searchlight caught them, held them for a fatal moment. Black, ominous holes peppered the wings. Glass shattered from the instruments before him. A sudden, numbness paralyzed his shoulder.
The betraying light had passed. But gasoline reeked in his nostrils, and a quick banner of yellow flame rippled backward. Twisting in the cockpit, he saw behind them the second enemy, diving out of the cloud still firing.
And he saw the dark blood that stained Shan’s drawn face.
They were done for. But Shan grinned stiffly, raised a crimson hand to gesture. Lanning flung the creaking ship through a reckless Immelmann turn. The attacker was caught dead ahead, still firing.
A red sledge of agony smashed all feeling from Lanning’s right leg. But he held straight for the other ship, guns hammering. It dived. With flaming gasoline a roaring curtain beside him, Lanning clung grimly to its tail. The tiny puppets of its crew jerked and slumped. Then it, too, began to burn.
Two——!
Explosion buffeted Lanning’s head, deafening. Metal fragments seared past. Hot oil spattered his seared face. The motor ceased to run, and a new torturing tongue of yellow licked back.
Strangling, Lanning sideslipped, so that the wind stream would carry away the heat and suffocating fumes. He looked back at Shan. The crimson face of the little Oriental was now a dreadful mask. With a queer, solemn little grin, he held up something in a dripping hand—his watch.
A cold shudder went down Lanning’s spine. He had never laughed at superstition. And there was something terrible, now, in this hint that something could perceive the future.
Then stark incredulity froze Shan’s grin, and he pointed stiffly. Lanning’s eyes followed the crimson-streaming arm. And a cold hand stopped his heart. For something was flashing down beside them.
Something—incredible.
It was a queer-looking ship—or the gray, shining ghost of a ship. It was wingless, flat-decked—like no ship the sky had ever seen. Its bright hull suggested that of a small submarine, save that its ends terminated abruptly with two massive disks of metal, which now shone greenishly.
A singular crew lined the rail, along the open deck. At first they seemed spectral and, like the ship, unreal. Several were strange in odd, trim tunics of silver-gray and green. But there were a few in familiar military uniforms—a French colonel—an Austrian lieutenant and a tall, lank captain of the Royal Air Force.
Lanning’s mouth fell open, and a sudden agony of joy wrenched his sick body. For he saw Barry Halloran!
Unchanged since that fatal April day of ten years ago, even wearing the same baggy cords and football sweater, the gigantic tackle stood among the rest! He saw Lanning, and grinned, and waved an eager greeting.
The phantom craft swept closer, dropping with the burning plane.
Lanning’s pain was drowned in wonderment, and he ceased to breathe. He saw a thin, white-haired man—a figure puzzlingly familiar—busy beneath the small, crystal dome that capped a round metal turret, amidships. A crystal gun thrust out of the turret. A broad blinding-yellow ray funneled suddenly from it and caught at the plane.
LANNING felt a momentary wrenching pull. The plane and his body resisted that surge of mysterious force. Red mighty hands of agony twisted his hurt body, squeezed intolerably. Then something yielded. And the spectral ship was suddenly real, approaching.
Yellow flame wrapped Lanning again, for his fingers had slipped useless from the stick. He coughed, strangled, battled a sea of suffocating darkness. Searing torture bathed him. Then he was being drawn over the rail of the stranger, out of the furnace.
The ghost ship seemed real now. Quick, tender hands were laying them on stretchers. But Lanning was staring up at big, red-headed Barry Halloran, magically unchanged by ten years of time.
“Sure, old man, it’s me!” boomed the once-familiar voice. “Just hold that line! These guys will fix you up as good as new—or better. And then we’ll have a chin. Guess I’m way behind the times.”
A spectral ship, manned with a crew of the dead! Lanning had not been superstitious—not even, in the conventional sense, religious. His faith had been a belief in the high destiny of man. He had expected death to blot him out, individually; the race, alone, was eternal. This Stygian ship, therefore, was utterly incredible—but it looked decidedly interesting.
“Barry!” he whispered. “Glad—see you——”
A wave of shadow dimmed his eyes. Blood was welling from his aching shoulder, hot and sticky against his body. A dull throbbing came from his shattered leg. Dimly, he knew that the men in gray and green were picking up the stretcher. Awareness faded.
V.
WHEN Dennis Lanning began to be fully conscious again, it seemed that he had always been in that small, green-walled room. His old roving life, restless and haunted, seemed dreamlike, remote beyond reality—all save, somehow, the visitations of Lethonee and Sorainya.
Dimly he remembered an operating room—blinding lights and bustling men in white masks, the gleam and tinkle of instruments, Barry Halloran standing reassuringly near. Then a whiff of some strange anaesthetic.
Shan was lying in the opposite bed, quietly sleeping. And Lanning, in some forgotten interval, had met the two others in the ward. They were Silvano Cresto, Spanish ace shot down in the Moroccan war; and Willie Rand, U. S. N., missing when the ill-fated airship Akron was destroyed at sea.
The latter was now propped up on his pillows, inhaling through a cigarette. He grinned. “Smoke?”
“Thanks.” Lanning caught the tossed white cylinder, felt a dull twinge from his bandaged shoulder. He asked, “What’s up?”
Willie Rand exhaled white vapor.
“Dunno.”
“What is this—ship? Where’re we going?”
Rand blew a great silver ring.
“Her name’s the Chronion. Cap’n Wil McLan. We’re bound, they say, for a place called Jonbar—wherever that is!”
Wonder stiffened Lanning. Wil McLan! His old roommate, the student of Time. And Jonbar! Lethonee’s city, that she had showed him, far-off in dim futurity.
“But why?” he gasped. “I don’t understand!”
“Nor me. All I know, messmate, I turned loose when the wreckage of the Akron was rolling over on me, and tried to dive clear. Something smashed into me, and I woke up on this bed. That was maybe a week ago——”
“A week!” muttered Lanning. “But the Akron—that was back in ‘thirty-three!”
Rand lit another cigarette from the first.
“Time don’t make no difference here. The last man on your bed was the Austrian, Erich von Arneth. He came from the Isonzo front, in 1915. The one in the Chink’s bed was the Frenchman, Jean Querard. He was blown up in the defense of Paris, in 1940.”
“Forty!” whispered Lanning, softly. Was to-morrow, then, already real? Lethonee? And Sorainya?
A brisk man in gray and green hastened into the ward, gently removed their cigarettes and replaced them with odd-looking thermometers. Lanning took the instrument out of his mouth.
“Where’s Barry?” he demanded. “I want to see Barry Halloran. And Wil McLan.”
“Not now, sir.” The rhythmic accent was curiously familiar—it was like Lethonee’s! “It’s time for your last dynat intravenous. You’ll be able to get up when you wake. Now just lie back, sir, and give me your arm.”
He put back the thermometer. Another man rolled in a wheeled instrument table. Deft hands bared and swabbed Lanning’s arm. He felt the sting of a hypodermic. And quiet sleep came over him.
When at last he woke, it was to a new, delicious sense of health and fitness. The bandages were gone. His shoulder, his shattered leg, felt well and whole again.
Even the steel no longer ached in his knee.
Shan, he saw, was gone from the opposite bed. In it lay a big man, swathed in bandages, regarding him with dark, stolid Slavish eyes. A silent orderly came in, thrust a dozen little glowing needles into the Russian’s bandages, and laid Lanning’s old uniform, cleaned and neatly repaired, beside his bed.
“Boris Barinin,” he gave brisk information. “Soviet rocket-flier. We picked him up near the pole in 1942. Smashed, starved, frozen. The dynat repair-hormone activators will take him through, however. You may go above.
LANNING put on the uniform, elated with his new sense of well-being, and eagerly mounted a companion to the deck of the Chronion. It was seventy feet long, between the polished faces of the great metal disks, broken only with the domed turret amidships. Some mechanism throbbed softly below.
The ship must be moving. But where?
Looking about for a glimpse of the sun, or any landmark, Lanning could see only a curiously flickering blue haze. He went to the rail, peered down. Still there was nothing. The Chronion hung in a featureless, blue abysm.
The flicker in the azure mist was oddly disturbing. Sometimes, he thought, he could almost see the outline of some far mountain, the glint of waves, the shapes of trees or buildings—incongruous, impressions, queerly flat. Two-dimensional things piled one upon another. It was like a movie screen, he thought, upon which the frames were being thrown a thousand times too fast, so that the projected image became a dancing blur.
“Denny, old man!”
It was a glad shout, and Barry Halloran came to him with an eager step. Lanning gripped his hand, seized his big shoulder. It was good to feel its hard young power, to see the reckless freckled grin.
“You’re looking fit, Barry. Not a day older!”
The blue eyes were wide with awe.
“Funny business, Denny. It’s ten days since they picked me up, trying to swim away from that smashed crate in the Charles, with both legs broken. But—you’ve lived ten years!”
Lanning shook his fine-chiseled head, bewildered.
“What’s ahead of us, Barry? What’s it all about?”
The big tackle scratched the unkempt tangle of his red hair.
“No savvy, Denny. Wil has promised us a scrap, all right. And it’s to save this place they call Jonbar. But what the odds are, or who we’re going to fight, or how come—I don’t know.”
“I’m going to find out,” Lanning said. “Or try. Where’s Wil McLan?”
“He’s on his bridge. I’ll show you the way.”
They met four men in the gray and green, just coming on the deck carrying two rolled stretchers. Following them was the little group of fighting men in their various uniforms. Lao Meng Shan grinned happily to see Lanning, and presented the rest.
They were the Spaniard, Cresto; Willie Rand; the lank British flier, Courtney-Pharr; hard-faced Erich von Arneth; dapper little Jean Querard; and Emil Schorn, a blue-eyed herculean Prussian, who had been taken from a burning Zeppelin in 1917.
“Where we go?” Cresto shrugged, white teeth flashing through his swarthy grin. “Quien sabe! Anyhow, amigos, this is better than hell! Verdad!” He laughed.
“We are fighting men,” rumbled Emil Schorn, grimly smiling. “We go to fight. Ach, ’s ist genug!”
“Quite a gang, eh?” Barry Halloran led Lanning on, to a small metal door in the turret. Inside, another man in gray and green waited alertly behind a bulky thing like a cannon with a barrel of glass, “You’ll find Wil up under the dome.”
Lanning climbed metal steps. Standing behind a bright wheel, under the flawless shell of crystal, he came upon a slight, strange little man—or the shattered wreck of a man. His breath sucked in to the shock of sympathetic pain. For the stranger was hideous with the manifold print of unspeakable agony.
THE HANDS—restlessly fumbling with an odd little tube of bright-worn silver that hung by a thin chain about his neck—were yellow, bloodless claws, trembling, twisted with pain. The whole thin body was grotesquely stooped and gnarled, as if every bone had been broken on a torture wheel.
