Collected Short Fiction, page 299
“Don’t fly tomorrow,” she warned him. “Or Jonbar will be slain!”
Lanning obeyed, because he had fallen in love with her vanishing image. And Barry Halloran was killed in his stead.
Grief-stricken, Lanning left America. And Sorainya appeared to him, floating beside the rail of his ship in the tropics, on her golden shell of Time. Red-mailed warrior queen of Gyronchi, splendid and alluring, she called to him to leap to the shell and return with her to share her throne.
He was about to leap, when Lethonee came back to warn him. For the shell was but an image. He would have fallen to die in the shark-infested sea. Sorainya vanished, angered. And Lethonee explained.
Jonbar and Gyronchi are two conflicting possible worlds, of future probability. Either of them may be made real by the fifth-dimensional progression. But not both. They are fighting for survival. And the choice of reality is in Tanning’s hands, Lethonee tells him. She and Sorainya are each beckoning him to carry the choice into her own hall of possible futurity. The choice is his—the outcome veiled in unresolved probability.
Haunted, Lanning walked bewildered through the years. Lethonee guarded his life. Sorainya tried again to lure him to death. He became war correspondent, pilot, soldier—fighting always the right of might. In 1938, flying one night with Lao Meng Shan to defend Hankow from air raiders, he was shot down.
As they plunged down in the flaming plane, dying, a queer, shining ship appeared beside them. Dead Barry Halloran was among the group of men in assorted military uniforms, who dragged them aboard!
They wake up in the ship’s hospital, restored by strange doctors using the mysterious dynat. The others, Lanning learns, have been snatched from death in the same amazing manner. The ship, the Chronion, is to take them to Jonbar. And its captain is Wil McLan.
Going to the bridge for information, Lanning finds McLan strangely aged, scarred from frightful torture. The explanation is interrupted, while the Chronion flashes down into a chaos of fighting battleships. It is Jutland, in 1916! A dying sailor is pulled aboard, rushed to the hospital.
Then Wil McLan, almost voiceless, whispering, tells how he mastered Time, looked into Sorainya’s possible future world, arid fell in love with her. How she encouraged him to build the atomic-powered time ship, which he finished in 1960.
At once, he had set out down the geodesics of the future to Gyronchi, to join the beautiful Sorainya. Sorainya immediately threw him into her dungeons, turned the Chronion over to the priests of the black gyrane. And laughed at McLan for hoping to win her, warrior-queen of Gyronchi!
Ten years Wil McLan spent in her torture vaults—for he would not give her the secret of the time ship. At last, Lethonee finds him in her chronotron time-scanner, and helps him escape. McLan reaches the time ship, and then Jonbar.
Now, he tells Lanning, they are organizing a Legion of Time to fight for Jonbar and against Gyronchi. But since each represents a different facet of the same age, they are mutually impossible, contradictory. Which will be brought to reality by the progression of the fifth-dimensional axis of Time, depends, in part, on Denny Lanning. Hence, each of the futures is fighting for his services. Since they are mutually exclusive, neither can directly attack the latter.
But, when Wil McLan tries to look at Jonbar from the chronoscope aboard the Chronion, it is beyond his range! Gyronchi has done something, in some time, to diminish the probability of Jonbar. It if so diminished that the Chronion may never be able to reach it again!
VIII.
BORIS BARININ came up from the hospital ward. Then two Canadians, lean silent twins named Isaac and Israel Enders, who had been taken aboard, before Lanning left his bed, from a shell hole on the Western Front. And at last Duffy Clark, the British sailor from Jutland.
Willingly taking the oath, they made twelve men under Lanning. He organized them into squads, made big, fearless Emil Schorn his second in command, and began drilling on the deck.
There were arms, he found: a dozen Mauser rifles, two dozen Luger pistols, four crated Maxim machine guns, several boxes of hand grenades, and a hundred thousand rounds of assorted ammunition, which McLan had taken—along with a stock of food and a few medical supplies—from a sinking munitions ship.
“The first precaution,” the old man rasped. “We located a torpedoed arms ship when we first came back from Jonbar to collect supplies and weapons—and test our technique of recovery. Weapons from Jonbar, you see, wouldn’t function against targets from Gyronchi—mutually impossible! And men who had been eating food from Jonbar, in a raid on Gyronchi, might find themselves—well, hungry.”
Lanning superintended the unpacking, inspection, and assembly of the weapons, served out the rifles and automatics, assigned crews to the machine guns. Since McLan’s assistants from Jonbar would be unable to enter Gyronchi, he detailed Clark, Barinin, and Lao Meng Shan as crew for the Chronion, and himself learned something of her navigation.
And the time ship drove steadily down the geodesics of Jonbar. The atomic convertors throbbed endlessly beneath the deck. Sometimes Lanning relieved him, but Wil McLan seldom left the control dome.
“The world we seek is now all but impossible,” he rasped. “The full power of the field drives us forward very slowly. And at any instant the geodesics of Jonbar may break, for they are weak enough already, and leave us—notime!”
Once, in his tiny cabin aft, Lanning woke in his bunk with a clear memory of Lethonee. Slim and tall in her long white robe, she had stood before him, holding the flaming splendor of the chronotron. Despair was a shadow on her face, her violet eyes dark pools of pain.
“Denny,” her urgent words rang clear in his memory, “come to Jonbar—or we are dead.”
Lanning went at once to the bridge, and told McLan. The old man shook his white head, grimly.
“We are already doing all that can be done,” he said. “The geodesics of Jonbar are like microscopic wires drawn out thinner and thinner by the attenuation of probability. If the tracer loses them, or if they snap, Jonbar is—lost.”
Helpless, Lanning could only return to the drilling of his men.
TWO WEEKS passed, by the time of the ship—physiological time, that measured by heartbeats and all bodily rhythms, in which the span of life moved relentlessly toward its end, regardless of motion backward or forward along the time dimension. And at last the Chronion slipped silently out of the blue, shimmering abyss. Lanning, waiting eagerly on the deck, saw beneath them—Jonbar!
The ship was two miles high. Yet, so far as his eye could reach in every direction, stretched that metropolis of futurity. Mirror-faced with polished metal, the majestic buildings were more inspiring than cathedrals in their soaring grace. With a pleasing lack of regularity, they stood far apart all across the green parklike valley of a broad placid river, and crowned the wooded mills beyond. Wide traffic viaducts, many-leveled, flowed among them, busy with strange, bright vehicles. Coming and going above the towers, great silver teardrops swam through the air about the ship.
Lanning had glimpsed it once before, through Lethonee’s jewel. But its majestic reality was new. The staggering vastness and the ordered splendor of it shook him with a kind of awe. Hundreds of millions, he knew, lived here, labored, loved, rejoiced in the happiest estate that mankind had ever known—or, he realized, he should put it, might ever know. And all the wonder of this world, the incredible fact came to him stunningly, was faced with absolute annihilation.
Trembling with eagerness and dread, he hastened up to Wil McLan.
“This is Jonbar!” he cried. “Then it’s still—safe? And we can find Lethonee?”
The bent old man turned solemnly from the polished wheel, and shook his scarred white head.
“We’re here,” came his grave, voiceless whisper. “But only the geodesic analyzers can measure the degree of Jonbar’s probability. It hangs by a strand weaker than a spider’s web. Lethonee will doubless be at her new laboratory.”
The Chronion was gliding swiftly down to a mile-high argent spire—that soared from a wooded height—propelled in space, McLan had explained, by the same special field that moved it in Time. A vast doorway slid open in a silvery wall. The little ship floated into an immense hangarlike space, crowded with streamlined craft. A green light beckoned them to land on an empty platform.
“This is the world we must fight to save,” Lanning told the men.
“Ach!” rumbled Emil Schorn. “It is a good world, well worth fighting for.”
Leaving the big Prussian in command, and warning him to be ready for instant action in case of emergency, Lanning and McLan left the ship. An elevator in a great pillar shot them upward. They emerged into the cool refreshment of open air, amid the gay verdure of a terrace garden. A sliding door opened in a bright wall beyond. Tripping eagerly out of it, to meet them, came Lethonee.
Instead of the long white robes in which Lanning had always seen her, she wore a close-fitting dress of softly shimmering, metallic blue, and a blue band held her dark ruddy hair. Something of the grave solemnity of the apparitions was gone. She was just a lovely, human girl, joyously eager to see him—and trying, he thought, to hide a tragic despair.
She came quickly to him, through the bright garden, and took both his hands in an eager grasp. And Lanning felt a queer little shiver of joy at the warm reality of her touch.
“DENNY LANNING!” she whispered. “At last you have come. I am so glad.”
Her weary, troubled eyes went to scarred old Wil McLan.
“Gyronchi has carried out some attack,” she told him gravely. “A warning came from the dynon, and now—they are gone. The full power of the chronotron will not penetrate forward, beyond tonight.”
Her voice was hushed and shaken; in her eyes was the shadow of doom.
“I have been with them twenty hours in the laboratory. But we could discover nothing. Only that this is the last possible night of Jonbar. Unless——”
Her haunted eyes clung desperately to Lanning’s face.
“Unless the tide of probability is changed.”
Wil McLan limped toward the sliding door, breathing huskily. “I’m going up to the laboratory.”
Lanning lingered, and his thirsty eyes caught the girl’s.
“I have done all I can, there,” she said. “And, if this is the last day of Jonbar, I should like to spend an hour of it with you, Denny. Perhaps the only hour we shall ever have together.”
“I’ll send for you, Denny, if we discover anything,” rasped McLan. “You can do nothing, until—unless—we find what action Gyronchi has taken.”
He turned through the sliding door. Alone on the terrace with Lethonee, Lanning was overcome with a sense of incredulity. He looked wonderingly at her grave quiet beauty, framed in the greenery, asking, “How can I believe that you aren’t real? What is the difference between reality and such a seeming as this?”
“The universe of reality, determined by progression on the fifth axis, is simple and complete,” the girl told him solemnly. “All the branching geodesics of possibility tend to pick up energy; all possible worlds strive for reality. But only one line, at each bifurcation, can win. All energy is withdrawn from those other, half-formed worlds, as the world lines of the victorious one are fixed in the fifth dimension. And it is as if they had never been.”
Her white face was very sober.
“In a manner of speaking, all the seeming reality of Jonbar—even I—was given creation by the atomic power of the Chronion, bringing you down the geodesics. We are only an illusion of possibility, the reflection of what may be—a reflection that is doomed!”
Abruptly, then—and Lanning knew that it took a desperate effort—she tossed her lovely head, and smiled.
“But why need illusions talk of illusion?” The silver voice was almost gay. “Aren’t you hungry, Denny? Gather flowers for the table, and let us dine—on illusion!”
WITH HER own hands she set a small table at the rail that edged the terrace. The huge white buds that Lanning picked bathed them in a delicate perfume. Beyond the rail, and a mile below, stretched the green parklands. Other silver pylons shimmered magnificent on distant hills. The genial sun was setting from a serene sky, of a blue clarity that Lanning had never seen above a sky. A cool wind whiskered across the garden, in a silence of ineffable peace.
“Nothing can happen to you, or to Jonbar, surely,” whispered Lanning, sipping a glass of fragrant wine. “Perfection cannot die!”
“But it can.” Her voice shuddered. “When the whole continuum is tortured with forces in conflict, who can foretell the outcome?”
Lanning caught her hand. “Lethonee,” he said huskily, “for ten years of my life, since the first night you came to me, I have lived in hope of finding you. Now, if anything should take you——”
An iron grasp closed on his throat.
The girl moved closer, shivering. “But we know,” came her dread-chilled voice, “that this is the last night of Jonbar. The chronotron can discover no possible tomorrow!”
The blue dusk turned to mauve and to purple-black. The far towers of Jonbar shone like pillars of fire. And the roadways, sweeping through the dark woodlands, were broad, brilliant rivers of flowing light.
Shadows filled the terrace. Some night-blooming shrub sent out a flood of intoxicating sweetness. Slow music came softly from somewhere below. Close to Lethonee, Lanning strove vainly to forget the torturing pressure of peril, sought to grasp and hold her threatened reality with the strength of his arms.
Suddenly the girl’s hand stiffened in his, and she caught a gasping, frightened breath.
“Greetings!” rang out a voice of golden mockery, “Queen of Nothingness!”
LANNING looked up, startled. Above the terrace, floating as he had seen it before, was a long, shallow, golden shell. Sorainya stood in it, proudly erect in a long-sleeved shirt and kilt of woven scarlet mail. Beside her stood a tall, angular man—gaunt-faced, with dark, sullen eyes and cruel, heavy lips—robed to his feet in dull, stiff black.
Glarath, the latter must be, Lanning knew, high priest of the strange gyrane. His sunken black eyes smouldered with a malevolent flame. But Sorainya’s greenish glance held a mocking amusement.
“Best taste her kisses while you may, Denny Lanning,” she taunted. “For we have found a higher crucial factor. I didn’t need you, Denny Lanning, after all—Glarath, with the gyrane, took the place I offered you. And now the struggle is won!”
The black-haired hand of the priest clutched possessively at her strong, bare arm. He snarled some guttural, unintelligible word, and his dark eyes burned at Lanning, terrible with hate.
Sorainya whipped out the thin golden needle of her sword, and drew it in a flashing arc above the dark city. And she leaned into the black priest’s arms.
“Farewell, Denny Lanning,” pealed the mockery of her shout. “And take warning! All Jonbar—and the phantom in your arms—will be gone before the wind. We have come to watch the end.”
With the hand that held the sword, she flung him a derisive kiss. Her foot touched some control, and the shell soared upward and vanished in the sky of night.
White-faced, shaken, Lethonee was on her feet. “Come to the laboratory!” Her voice was dry with alarm. “I hadn’t meant to stay so long.”
Lanning followed her to the sliding door. Beyond it, he glimpsed a vast tower room. At endless tables, hundreds of men and women were busy with mathematical instruments: calculating machines, planimeters, integrators, and harmonic analyzers. Beyond was a huge bulwark of intricate mechanism, resembling a magnified version of a product integraph Lanning had seen at the Massachusetts Tech, capable of solving problems too complex for the human brain. Beyond, in a far wing, pedestals supported scores of huge crystals like the chronotron screen Lanning had seen in the hands of Lethonee. Swift activity hummed everywhere.
BEFORE they had entered, however, Wil McLan came to meet them at a frantic, limping run. His white hair was wild, a desperate urgency strained his haggard face.
“Back, Denny!” It was a rasping, whispered scream. “Get back aboard. Jonbar is—going!”
Lanning swept Lethonee with him into the elevator. McLan tumbled after them. The cage dropped toward the hangar. Lanning held the girl in quivering arms.
“Darling——” he whispered. “You are coming with us!”
She shook her tragic head. “No, Denny. I am part of Jonbar.” She clung to him, desperately.
The elevator stopped. Lanning caught Lethonee’s hand, and they ran out across the hangar, toward the Chronion. Ahead, Lanning saw a welcoming throng of gay-clad people gathered about the time ship, tossing flowers to the deck. Dapper Jean Querard stood by the rail, making a speech.
But a curious dim, silver light was beginning to steal over the crowd and the teardrop ships and the walls, as if they were beginning to dissolve in a silver mist. Only the Chronion remained clear, real.
Lanning sprinted.
“Hurry!” he sobbed. “Darling——”
But Lethonee’s fingers were gone from his hand. He stopped, and saw her still beside him—but dim as a ghost. Frantically, her shadow beckoned him to go on. He tried to catch her up in his arms. But she faded from his grasp. She was gone.
McLan had passed him. Lanning caught a sobbing breath, and fought a blinding pain, and stumbled on—— But what was the use, demanded bitter agony, if Lethonee was gone?
Everything but the Chronion was dim now. Beginning to flicker like the blue abysm in which the time ship rode. He saw Wil McLan scramble up a ladder. But the floor was giving way. His running feet sank deep, as if its metal had been soft snow.
And it was gone. Lanning caught his breath, and clutched out desperately, and fell. The last wraith of the building flickered away. Jonbar was gone. Beneath, under the empty night, lay only a featureless dark plain. And Lanning was plunging unchecked toward it, a cold wind screaming up about him.
A malicious golden voice pealed: “Farewell!”
