Collected Short Fiction, page 297
But it was the haggard, livid face, cross-hatched with a white net of ridged scars that chilled Lanning with its horror. Beneath a tangled abundance of loose white hair, that face was a stiff, pain-graven mask, terrible to see. Dark, deep-sunken, the eyes were somber wells of agony—and of a deathless, brooding hatred.
Strangely, those dreadful orbs lit with recognition.
“Denny!” It was an eager whisper, but queerly dry and voiceless.
The little man limped quickly to meet him, thrust out a trembling hand that was thin and twisted and broken, hideous with a web of scars. His breath was a swift, whistling gasp.
Lanning tried to put down the wondering dread that shook him. He took that frail dry claw of a hand, and tried to smile.
“Wil?” he whispered. “You are Wil McLan?”
He choked back the other, fearful question: What frightful thing has happened to you, Wil?
“Yes, Denny,” hissed that voiceless voice.——”But—I’ve lived forty years more than you have. And ten of them in Sorainya’s torture vault.” Lanning started to that name. And the old man stiffened as he spoke it, and something flared in his hollow eyes—the baleful fire of hate, Lanning thought it was, that kept his shattered body alive.
“I’m an old man, Denny,” the dry rasping ran on. “I was fifty-three when the Chronion was launched on the time-stream, in 1960. The ten years in Gyronchi——” The seamed face went white, the whisper sank. “They were a thousand! And the last four years, in Jonbar, I’ve been preparing for our campaign.”
His gnarled body came erect with a tense and desperate energy. A grim light flamed in his sunken eyes.
“An old man!” he husked again. “But not too old to fight Gyronchi! The dynat has given me life enough for that.”
A sudden eager hope had risen in Lanning, above his wonder and dread.
“Jonbar?” he cried.——”Then—then have you seen a girl named Lethonee?” Desperately, he searched that scarred and tortured face. A painful pulse was throbbing in his throat. The tension of his hope was agony. Was it possible—possible that that “gulf more terrible than death” could now be crossed?
The old man nodded, slowly. The stern strength of hate seemed to ebb out of him, and the bleak grimness of his face was lit with a stiff little smile.
“Yes, Denny,” his whisper came softly. “Indeed I know Lethonee. It is she who set me free from the dungeons of Sorainya. It is for her, and her people, that we must fight—or Gyronchi will obliterate them.”
Lanning caught his breath. Trembling, his fingers touched Wil McLan’s twisted, emaciated shoulder.
“Tell me, Wil,” he begged. “This is all a riddle—a crazy, horrible riddle. Where is Jonbar? Can I go to Lethonee, help her? And, Sorainya——”
Dread choked him, “What—what did she do to you?”
“I’ll tell you, Denny—presently.”
McLan’s hollow eyes flashed to the dials of a bewildering instrument board. Moving with a swift precision that amazed Lanning, his gnarled fingers touched a series of levers and keys, spun a polished wheel. He whispered some order into a tube, peered ahead through the crystal dome. An alert, surprising strength moved his shattered frame.
“Presently,” his hoarse whisper came aside to Lanning. “As soon as this task is done. Watch, if you like.”
STANDING wonderingly behind him, Lanning stared out through the crystalline curve of the dome. The blue, enveloping haze flickered more violently. Bent over a creeping dial, McLan tapped a key. And the blue was gone.
The Chronion was flying low, over a gray, wave-tossed sea. It was late of a gloomy afternoon, and thick mists veiled the horizon. The little craft shuddered, abruptly, to the crash of mighty guns.
Lanning looked questioningly at Wil McLan. A twisted arm pointed, silently. And Lanning saw the long, gray shapes of battle-cruisers loom suddenly out of the haze, rocking as they erupted smoke and flame.
McLan tapped the keyboard beyond the wheel, and the Chronion slipped forward again. The turret revolved beneath them, and the crystal gun thrust out. Below, the stretcher crews moved alertly to the rail.
Peering through the fog of battle at the reeling ships, Lanning distinguished the Union Jack, and then, on another vessel, the German imperial standard. Suddenly, breathless with incredulous awe, he fitted this chaotic scene into his knowledge of naval history.
“The Defense and the Warrior!” he gasped. “Attacking the Weisbaden! Is this—Jutland?”
Wil McLan glanced down at the dial.
“Yes. This is May 31, 1916. We await the sinking of the. Defense.”
Through the haze of acrid smoke, the Chronion slipped nearer the attacking British vessels. Suddenly, then, the German cruiser fleet loomed out of the mist, seeking with a hurricane of fire to cover the stricken Weisbaden. Two terrific salvoes rocked the doomed flagship Defense, and it was lost in a sheet of flame.
The intermingled battle-cruisers of both fleets were still plunging through the clouds of battle, great guns thunderously belching smoke and death, as Wil McLan brought the Chronion down where the Defense had vanished. Shattered wreckage littered the sea, rushing into a great whirlpool where the flagship had sunk.
A long helix burned incandescent in the crystal gun, and a broad yellow ray poured out into the drifting smoke. His sweater stripped off, Barry Halloran leapt overboard, carrying a rope. He was dragged back, through the ray, towing a limp survivor. Dripping blood and brine, the rescued sailor was laid on a stretcher, rushed below.
Courtney-Pharr was poised to dive, when the steel prow of the disabled Wars pit e plunged suddenly out of the blinding smoke. He stumbled fearfully back. Lanning caught his breath. It had run them down!
But Wil McLan tapped a key, spun the shining wheel. Green radiance lit the great terminal disks. And the battling fleets were swept away into blue, flickering twilight. The broken old man sighed with weary relief, and rubbed tiny beads of sweat from his scarred forehead.
“Well, Denny,” he whispered. “One more man to fight for Jonbar.”
“Now!” demanded Lanning, breathless. “Can you explain?”
VI.
LEANING against the bright rim of his wheel, Wil McLan pushed back the snow-white shock of his hair. Then, as if arranging his thoughts, he began fingering with twisted broken hands the white scars that seamed his face, and the pendant silver tube.
“Please forgive my lack of a voice, Denny,” his hoarse whisper came at last. “But once in the dungeon, when I had had nothing to drink for a week but the blood of a rat, and was delirious and screaming with thirst, Sorainya had molten metal poured down by throat. And not even the dynat can grow new vocal cords. She’ll pay for that!”
Hate had flared in the sunken eyes again, and drawn the gnarled body to a taut rigidity. But the old man seemed to make an effort to compose himself. He unclenched his hands, and his twisted face tried to smile. He spoke more deliberately. “Time was always a challenge to me. When science lived in a simple continuum of four dimensions, with Time the fourth, its conquest appeared relatively simple—through some application, perhaps, of the. classical Newtonian dynamics.
“But Max Planck with the quantum theory, de Broglie and Schroedinger with the wave mechanics, Heisenberg with matrix mechanics, enormously complicated the structure of the universe—and with it the problem of Time.
“With the substitution of waves of probability for concrete particles, the world lines of objects are no longer the fixed and simple paths they once were. Geodesics have an infinite proliferation of possible branches, at the whim of subatomic indeterminism.
“Still, of course, in large masses the statistical results of the new physics are not much different from those given by the classical laws. But there is a fundamental difference. The apparent reality of the universe is the same—but it rests upon a quicksand of possible change.
“Certainty is abolished.
“Let a man stand on a concrete floor. It is no longer certain that he will not fall through it. For he is sustained only by the continual reaction of atomic forces, and they are governed by probability alone.
“It is merely a very excellent statistical probability that keeps the man from radiating heat until his body is frozen solid, or absorbing it until he bursts into flame. From flying upward into space in defiance of Newton’s laws, or dissolving into a cloud of molecular particles.
“Mere probability is all that is left. And my first actual invention was a geodesic tracer, designed for its analysis. It was a semi-mathematical instrument, essentially a refinement of the old harmonic analyzer. Tracing the possible world-lines of material particles through Time, it opened a window to_ futurity.”
The hoarse whisper paused, and old Wil McLan limped to the side of the dome. His scarred, trembling hands lifted a black velvet cover from a rectangular block of some clear crystal mounted on the top of a metal cabinet.
“Here is the chronoscope,” he said. “The latest development of the instrument. Scansion depends upon a special curved field, through which a sub-etheric radiation is bent into the time-axis, projected forward, and reflected from electronic fields back to the instrument. A stereoscopic image is obtained within the crystal screen, through selective fluorescence to the beat frequencies of the interfering carrier waves projected at right angles from below. But I’ll show you Gyronchi.”
THE OLD MAN snapped a switch, manipulated dials at the end of the crystal block. It lit with a cloudy green. The green cleared, and a low cry escaped Lanning’s lips.
For, microscopically clear within the crystal, he saw a miniature world. A broad, silver river cut a fertile green plain dotted with villages. Beyond the river rose two hills.
One was crowned with a tremendous castellated citadel. Its frowning walls and mighty towers were gleaming red metal. Above them flowed banners of yellow and crimson and black. A massive gate opened in the foot of the hill, as he watched, and an armored troop poured out.
“Watch the marchers,” rasped McLan.
Lanning bent closer to the crystal block. Suddenly it seemed that he was looking through a window, into an actual world. He found the soldiers again, and uttered a muffled cry.
“They aren’t men!” he gasped. “They’re—insects!”
“They are ants,” came the whisper of McLan, “hypertrophied mutations produced by the gyrane. They are the kothrin, Sorainya’s savage horde. That is her castle on the hill, where she—held me. But look at the other hill.”
Lanning found it, topped with a temple of ebon black. The building was vast, but squat and low, faced with endless colonnades of thick, square columns. From the center of it rose a beam of blackness, of darkness thick and tangible, that widened into the sky like the angry funnel of a vast, symmetrical tornado.
“The temple of the gyrane,” husked Wil McLan, “where Glarath rules.” He was adjusting the dials again. “But watch!”
A village of flimsy huts swam closer. The marching column of gigantic, upright ants was swiftly surrounding it, driving the villagers—a fair-skinned, sturdy-looking folk, although ragged and starved—before them from the fields.
“This happened while I was in prison,” the old man rasped. “The offense of the people was that they had not paid their taxes to Sorainya and their tithes to the gyrane. And they had no grain to pay them, because Sorainya and her lords—hunting a convict for sport—had trampled and destroyed the fields.”
Armed with heavy golden axes and short thick guns of crimson metal, as well as with frightful mandibles, the six-limbed force made a terrible ring about the frightened village. And now an armored tanklike vehicle came down from the red citadel, and through the line of ants. A hot white beam flickered out of it, and miserable buildings exploded into flame. The wind carried a wall of fire across the village.
A slim human figure, in black-plumed scarlet armor, sprang from the tank to join the great black ants. A thin yellow sword played swiftly, cutting down the men and women and children that fled from the merciless flames.
The slaughter soon was done. That figure turned away from the smoking desolation, flung up the crimsoned sword in triumph, slipped back the helmet. A flood of yellow hair fell across the scarlet mail.
Lanning’s breath sucked in, and a bright pain pierced his heart.
“Why, that—” he gasped, “that’s—Sorainya!”
“Yes, Sorainya,” whispered Wil McLan. “The warrior-queen of Gyronchi.”
HE SNAPPED a switch, and that grim scene dissolved in the pellucid transparency of the crystal block. His hollow eyes lifted slowly to Lanning, and in them was rekindled the slumberous flame of hate. His gnarled hands knotted and relaxed, and lifted once more to fondle the little, worn, bright cylinder of silver that hung from his throat.
“It happened,” the hoarse voiceless gasp went on, “that Gyronchi was the first future world, out of all those possible, that the chronoscope revealed. And I saw Sorainya, splendid in her armor, flying on the back of a gigantic winged ant.
“You have seen that she is—well—attractive. And at first, the range of the instrument was limited to her youth, where scenes of—barbarity are less frequent. Remember, Denny, I was thirty years younger when I first saw her, in 1945. Her glorious beauty, the military-pomp of her empire—they seemed very foreign to my old scholar’s life. But I—” the old man gulped, “I—loved her.
“Neglecting other possible worlds that I might have explored, I followed her, for months—years. I didn’t know, then, the fatal change the temporal ray was causing.” His white head bowed. For a moment he was speechless. “But no process whatever can reveal the state of an electron without changing that state—a consequence of indeterminism. Even the sub-quanta of my scanning ray were absorbed by the atoms that reflected them. The result was an increase in the probability factor of Gyronchi—that is the root of all the tragedy.”
The scarred face made a grimace of pain.
“The blame is mine. For—before I was aware of it—the absorption had lessened the probability of all other possible worlds, so that Gyronchi was the only one the limited power of my instrument could reach. And that blinded me to the crime that I was doing.
“I hope you can understand my passion for Sorainya.”
Lanning’s hoarse and breathless whisper was an echo of his own: “I can.” The sunken eyes flamed again, and McLan fondled the silver tube.
“I watched her, with the chronoscope,” the rasping words ran on. “Sometimes I was driven to despair by her remoteness in Time and probability—and sometimes to desperate effort. For I resolved to conquer Time, and go to Gyronchi.
“In 1952, after seven years of effort, I was able to communicate. By increasing the power and focal definition of the sub-etheric temporal radiation, I was able to project a speaking image of myself to Sorainya’s fortress.”
Agony stiffened McLan’s scarred face. His lean jaw set. His breath came in rasping gusts, and it was half a minute before he could speak again.
“And so I made suit to Sorainya. At first she seemed puzzled and alarmed. But, after I had made several bodiless visits to her apartments, her attitude changed suddenly. Perhaps she had got advice from Glarath!”
His clenched hands cracked.
“She smiled,” the old man rasped. “She welcomed me and asked me to return. And she began to ask about my discoveries—saying that perhaps the priests of the gyrane, being themselves able scientists, could solve my remaining problems. If I could come to Gyronchi, she promised, I might share her throne.”
Lanning bit his lip and caught a gasping breath. Memory of Sorainya’s visits mocked him. But he did not interrupt.
“A mistrust of the priests, fortunately,” McLan went on, “kept me from divulging very much. But Sorainya’s bland encouragements, her lying smiles, redoubled my frantic efforts.
“THERE IS a terrific resistance to the displacement of any body in time. For the geodesics are anchored in the future, as well as in the past. The removal of a living person—which might warp all futurity—is impossible. And even to dislodge inert matter requires tremendous power.
“Nothing less than atomic energy, I soon perceived, could even begin to overcome that resistance. I set out, therefore, with the searching ray of the chronoscope, to discover the secret of the atom from future science. And there I met a curious difficulty.
“For the instrument—which, after all, can only analyze probabilities—sometimes queerly blurred the fine detail of script or printing. I studied the works of many future scientists—of John Barr and Ivor Gyros and many more. But essential words always faded.
“There is a law of sequence and progression, I found at last, operating along the fifth, rather than the temporal dimension, which imposes inexorable limits. It is that progression which actually creates reality out of possibility. And it is that higher law which prohibits all the trite absurdities met with in the old speculation about travel in Time, such as the chronic adventurer who returns to kill himself or his grandfather. The old logic of cause and effect is by no means abolished, but merely elevated to a higher dimension.
“The principle of the atomic energy-converter came at last only through independent research based on various scraps of knowledge. I built the first successful working model in 1958. It developed eight thousand horsepower—and I could carry it in one hand! But listen.”
He paused, leaned his haggard, scarred head to hear the soft thrumming that pulsed up through the deck. His hollow eyes shone with a weary triumph.
“There you hear the power of three hundred Niagaras, fed from the merest trickle of water. For each gram of matter converted yields 900 quintillion ergs of energy—enough, if it escaped, to turn the ship into a puff of highly incandescent gas.
“The very absorption of the temporal ray, which had so troubled me, now provided a resistance against which reaction was possible. An adaptation of the special field gave me a definite moment along the time axis.
