Collected Short Fiction, page 303
“But you saw Sorainya’s dungeons,” he rasped. “Now you know why Gyronchi must be destroyed.” He handed the brick to Lanning. “See if you can break it open.”
“I know,” Lanning was whispering grimly. “For I’ve seen Jonbar, and—Lethonee.”
The block was glass-hard. He tapped at it vainly, broke his pocket knife on it. then carried it down to the deck. It yielded at last to hack saw, chisel, and sledge. It proved to be a thick-walled box. packed with white fiber.
Breathless, with quivering fingers, Lanning drew out the packing, and uncovered—a thick, V-shaped piece of rusty iron.
His vague, wild expectations had been all of something spectacular. Perhaps some impressive document of State upon which history should have turned. Or the martyr’s weapon that might have slain some enemy of progress. And disappointment drove a leaden pain through his heart. With heavy feet, he carried it back to Wil McLan.
“Just a piece of scrap iron,” he said wearily. “Just an old magnet, out of the magneto of a Model T. And we spent all those lives to find it!”
“That doesn’t matter, what it is,” the old man whispered. “It was important enough, when Gyronchi wrenched it out of the past, to deflect the whole direction of probability—to destroy even the possibility of Jonbar.
“Now, with the chronoscope, I must try to find its place. And then we must put it back—if Sorainya will let us!” He looked suddenly up at Lanning. “But you’re tired, Denny. And you’ve been hurt.”
Lanning had hardly been conscious of fatigue. Even the ring and throb of pain in the back of his brain and become a tolerable thing, a vague and distant phenomenon that did not greatly matter. And he felt a great surprise, now, when the dome went black and he knew that he was falling on the floor.
XIII.
LANNING woke with his head bandaged, lying in the little green-walled hospital. Barry Halloran grinned at him from the opposite bed. The little cockney, Duffy Clark, came presently with a covered tray.
“Cap’n McLan?” he drawled. “Why Vs on ’is bridge, sor, with hall ’is bloomin’ gadgets. ’E’s tryin’ to find where that bloody she-devil and ’er blarsted ants got ’old of that magnet.”
“Any luck?” demanded Lanning.
He shook a tousled head.
“Don’t look it, sor. Wot with hall Spayce and Time to search for the spot. And the woman and the blarsted priest is arfter us, sor. in a black ship full of the bloomin’ hants! We’ve seen it—twice, sor. A blinkin’ ’ellship!”
“But we can outrun them!” broke in Barry Halloran. “The Chronion can give ‘em all they want.”
“Ayn’t easy, sor!” Clark shook his head. “Cap’n McLan’s running the fields at full potential, with the bloomin’ converters overloaded. And still they’re ’olding us, neck and neck. Lor. the bloody swine!”
An overwhelming lethargy was still in Lanning. He ate, and slept again.
And many hours of the ship’s time must have passed when he suddenly awoke, aware of another sound above the accelerated throb of the atomic converters—the hammering of the Maxim!
He tumbled out of bed, with Barry Halloran after him, and ran to the deck. The firing had stopped, however, when they reached it. The Chronion was once more thrumming alone through the flickering blue abyss.
But little Duffy Clark lay beside the Maxim, smoking and still, his body half consumed by the gyrane ray.
Shuddering, Lanning climbed up into the dome.
“They caught us,” sobbed voiceless Wil McLan. “They’ll catch us again. The converters are overdriven. As the grids are consumed, they lose efficiency. They got poor Clark. That leaves four.”
The question burning in his eyes, Lanning whispered: “Did you find—anything?”
Solemnly, the old man nodded, and Lanning listened breathlessly.
“The time is an afternoon in August of the year 1921,” whispered Wil McLan. “The broken geodesics of Jonbar had already given us a clue to that. And I have found the place, with the chronoscope.”
Lanning gripped his arm. “Where?”
“It’s a little valley in the Ozarks of Arkansas. But I’ll show you the decisive scene.”
The little man limped to the metal cabinet of the geodesic analyzer, and his broken fingers carefully set its dials. A greenish luminescence filled the crystal block, and cleared. Lanning bent forward eagerly, to peer into that pellucid window of probability.
An impoverished farm lay before his eyes, folded in the low and ancient hills. A sagging shack of gray, paintless pine, a broken window gaping black and the roof inadequately patched with rusty tin, leaned crazily beside an eroded rocky field. The sloping cow pasture, above, was scantily covered with brush and gnarled little trees.
A SMALL, freckled boy, in faded overalls and a big ragged straw hat, was trudging slowly barefoot down the slope, accompanied by a gaunt, yellow dog, driving two lean red-spotted cows home to the milking pen.
“Watch him,” whispered Wil McLan.
And Lanning followed the idle path of of the boy. He stopped to encourage the dog digging furiously after a rabbit. He squatted to watch the activities of a colony of ants. He ran to catch a gaudy butterfly, and carefully dissected it. He rose unwillingly to answer the halloo of a slatternly woman from the house below, and followed the cows.
Wil McLan’s gnarled fingers closed on Lanning’s arm, urgently.
“Now!”
Idly whittling with a battered knife, the boy spied something beside a sumac bush, and stooped to pick it up. The object blurred oddly in the crystal screen, so that Lanning could not distinguish it. And vision faded, as Wil McLan snapped off the mechanism.
“Well?” demanded Lanning, bewildered. “What has that to do with Jonbar?”
“That is John Barr,” rasped the voiceless man. “For that metropolis of future possibility is—or might be—named in honor of the boy, barefoot son of a tenant farmer. He is twelve years old in 1921. You saw him at the turning point of his life—and the life of the world.”
“But I don’t understand!”
“The bifurcation of possibility is in the thing he stoops to pick up,” whispered Wil McLan. “It is either the magnet that we recovered from Sorainya’s citadel—or an oddly colored pebble which lies beside it.
“And that choice—which Sorainya sought to decide by removing the magnet—determines which of two possible John Barrs is ultimately fixed in the real universe by fifth dimensional progression.”
“But how?” said Lanning. “From such a small thing!”
“If he picks up the discarded magnet, he will discover the mysterious attraction it has for the blade of his knife, and the mysterious north-seeking power of its poles. He will wonder, experiment, theorize. Curiosity will deepen. The scientist will be born in him.
“He will study, borrow books on science from the teacher of the one-room school in the hollow. He will presently leave the farm, run away from a domineering father who sneers at ‘book larnin’,’ to work his way through college. And then he will become a teacher of science in country schools, an amateur experimenter.
“Sometimes the flame will burn low in him, inspiration be forgotten in the drudgery of life. He will marry, raise two children, absorbed for years in the cares of family life. But the old thirst to know will never die. The march of science will rekindle the flame. Finally, at the age of fifty-five, he will run away again—this time from a domineering wife and an obnoxious son-in-law—to carry on his research.
“A bald, plump little man, mild-mannered, dreamy, impractical, he will work for years alone in a little cottage in the Ozarks. Every possible cent will go for the makeshift apparatus powered from a crude homemade hydro-electric plant. He will go often hungry. Once, a kindly neighbor will find him starving, nearly dead of influenza.
“BUT AT LAST, in 1980, a tired but triumphant little man of seventy-one, he will publish his great discovery. The dynatomic tensors—shortened to dynat. A radically new principle in physics, making possible the release of atomic energy under control of the human will.
“Given freely to the world, the dynat will soon solve many problems of power, communication, and food—although John Barr, not waiting for material success, that same year will be quietly buried by his neighbors beside a little church in the Ozarks. And presently the illimitable power of the dynat will be the lifeblood of the splendid new metropolis of Jonbar, christened after him.
“Nor is that all. Ennobled humanity will soar on the wings of this most magnificent slave. For the dynat will bring a new contact of mind and matter, new senses, new capabilities. Gradually, as time goes on, mankind will become adapted to the full use of the dynat.”
The whisper was hoarse with a breathless awe.
“And at last a new race will arise, calling themselves the dynoti. The splendid children of John Barr’s old discovery, they will possess faculties and powers that we can hardly dream of——”
“Wait!” cried Lanning. “I’ve seen the dynon! When Lethonee first came, so long ago, to my room in Cambridge, she showed me New Jonbar, in the jewel of the chronotron. A city of majestic, shining pylons. And, flying above them, a glorious people, robed, it seemed, in pure fire!”
Hollow eyes shining, Wil McLan nodded solemnly.
“I, too, have looked into New Jonbar,” he whispered. “I have seen the promised glory beyond—the triumphant flight of the dynon, from star to star, forever! In that direction, there was no ending to the story of mankind.
“But in the other——”
His white head shook. There was silence under the dome. Lanning could hear the swiftened throb of the converters, driving them back through the blue shimmer of possibility toward the quiet scene in the Ozarks they had watched in the crystal block. He saw Lao Meng Shan cleaning the Maxim on the deck below. Barry Halloran, rifle ready, was peering alertly into the flickering abyss. Duffy Clark was already consigned to the gulf of Time.
“If we fail to replace the magnet,” the grave whisper at last resumed, “so that the boy John Barr picks up the pebble instead, the tide of probability will be turned—as, indeed, it is turned—toward Gyronchi.
“The boy will toss the pebble in his hand, then throw it in his sling to kill a singing bird. And all his life will want a precious spark. It will remain curiously similar, yet significantly different.
“JOHN BARR, in this outcome also, will run away from his father’s home, but now to become a shiftless migratory worker. He will marry the same woman, raise the same two children, and leave them in the same way. The same mechanical ingenuity, that might have discovered the dynat, will lead to the invention of a new gambling device, on which he will make and lose a fortune. He will die—equally penniless—in the same year, and be buried in the same graveyard in the Ozarks.
“The secret of atomic power will now be discovered nine years later, but with a control far less complete than that attained through the perfection of the dynat. The discoverer will be one Ivor Gyros, an exiled Russian-Greek, working with a renegade Buddhist priest in an abandoned monastery in Burma. Calling the secret the gyrane, the two will guard it selfishly, use it to destroy their enemies and impress the superstitious. They will found a new fanatical religion that will sweep the world, and a new despotic empire.”
The whisper paused again, gravely.
“That is the way of the cult of the gyrane, and of Sorainya’s dark dynasty,” rasped Wil McLan, at last. “A way of evil! You have seen the end of it.”
“I have!”
A little shudder touched Lanning, at memory of that desolate scene in the crystal block: mankind annihilated in the final war of the priests and the kings, by the gyrane and the monstrous mutations it had bred. The jungle returning across a devastated planet, to cover the rusting pile of Sorainya’s citadel and the shattered ruins of the vast, black temple.
Quivering, then, his hands grasped at the rusty V of the magnet, lying beside the controls of the chronoscope.
“And so—— And so all we have to do is to put it back, where the boy John Barr will pick it up?”
“All,” nodded Wil McLan. “If we can!”
Lanning started, then, and shivered to the rattle of the Maxim. His scarred face stiff with startled dread, Wil McLan was pointing. Lanning turned. Close beyond the dome, he saw the square, black mass of the time ship from Gyronchi.
“Mankind!” cried McLan. “The converters—failing!”
He flung his broken body toward the controls.
But already, Lanning saw, the decks had touched. In the face of the hammering Maxim, a horde of the gigantic ants, monstrous spawn of atomic radiation, was pouring over the rail. Leading them with the flame of her golden sword, magnificent in her crimson panoply, came Sorainya!
XIV.
“SORAINYA!” Lanning gasped. “She’s aboard!”
“Sorainya!” It was a stricken, husking echo from old Wil McLan. His broken hands came up, automatically, to the odd little tube of bright-worn silver that Lanning had wondered about so often, hanging at his throat. That ancient, smouldering hate glazed his sunken eyes again. Yet a strange agony racked his whisper. “Sorainya—must she die?”
“The ants!” warned Lanning. “Pouring aboard! Can we get away?”
Wil McLan started, and his hands fell to the controls again.
“Can try!” he rasped. “But that converter——”
A score of the great ants were rushing the Maxim on the foredeck. Lao Men Shan was crouched behind the rattling machine gun. And Barry Halloran stood beside it, a sturdy, smiling giant of battle, waiting with his bayonet for. the ants.
“Fight ’em!” his great voice was booming out cheerfully. “Fight ’em!”
Grinning blandly, the little Chinese made no sound at all.
With a ringing war cry, Sorainya had turned toward the turret, followed by a dozen ants. The needle of her golden sword flashed up, pointing at Wil McLan in the dome. And her green-eyed face was suddenly terrible with such a blazing passion of hate that Lanning shuddered from its fury.
“She’s coming here!” sobbed the dry, hoarse whisper of Wil McLan. “After me!” Terror flared red beside the ancient hatred and the puzzling agony in his eyes. “Ever since I refused to aid her conquest——”
Lanning was already running down the turret stair.
“I’ll try to stop her!”
And the whisper rasped after him: “And I’ll pull away—if the converters will stand it.”
In the little turret, beside the crystal helix-gun that projected the temporal field, Lanning belted on a Luger. He snatched the last Mauser from the rack, loaded it. His eye caught one hand grenade left in the box. He scooped it up, gripped the safety pin.
The little door was groaning and ringing to a furious assault from without—for the Chronion had not been designed for a fighting ship. It yielded suddenly, and a great black ant pitched through.
Lanning tossed the last grenade through the doorway, and ripped at the ant with his bayonet. He reeled to the burning stench of formic acid. A savage mandible ripped trousers and skin from his leg. But the third thrust stilled the monster, and he leapt into the doorway.
Outside, the grenade had cleared a little space. Three of the monsters lay where it had tossed them, crushed and dying. But the warrior queen stood unharmed in the crimson mail, with eight more ants about her. A savage light of battle flamed in her long green eyes, and she flung the ants forward with her golden sword.
“Denny Lanning,” her voice cut cold as steel. “You were warned. You defied Gyronchi, and chose her of Jonbar. So—die!”
Yet Lanning, waiting grim and silent in the turret’s doorway, had a moment’s respite. He had time for a glimpse of Barry and Shan, now engaged in a furious battle about the Maxim, holding back a murderous avalanche of ants. He caught Barry’s gasping, “Fight! Fight! Fight ’em, team!”
HE SAW BRIEFLY the high, black side of the other ship, beyond. He glimpsed the gaunt, cadaverous, black-robed priest, Glarath, safe on his quarter-deck. He saw a second company of ants, aglitter with gold and crimson weapons, gathered by the rail, ready to leap after the first.
Panic gripped his heart. It was an overwhelming horde.
But suddenly the black ship was gone, with Glarath and the rank of ants. There was only the flicker of the blue abyss. The throb of the over-driven converters was heavier beneath the deck. Wil McLan had driven the Chronion ahead once more in the race toward the past.
But Sorainya and her boarding party remained upon the deck. The Maxim suddenly ceased to fire. Shan and Barry were surrounded. Then the eight attacking ants converged upon Lanning in the doorway, urged on by Sorainya’s pealing shouts, and he had attention for nothing beyond them.
The bayonet had proved more effective than bullets against the great ants. And now, defending the doorway, Lanning fought with the same deadly technique he had mastered in Sorainya’s citadel.
A ripping lunge, a twist, a savage thrust. One ant fell. Another. A third. Fallen black bodies made an acrid reek. Spilled vital fluids were slippery on the deck.
The bullet from a crimson gun raked Lanning’s side. A golden axe touched his head with searing pain, where a tenderness remained from the other battle. A heavy gun, flung spinning like a club, knocked out his breath, sent him staggering back for a dangerous instant. But he recovered himself, lunged again.
Sorainya ran back and forth behind the ants, shrilling her battle cry. A cruel, smiling elation lit her beauteous face, and her narrowed green eyes were cold and bright with the lust of blood.
Once, when the ants fell back and gave her an opening, she leveled the needle of her sword at Lanning. Knowing the deadly fire it held, he ducked, and whipped a shot at her red-mailed body with the Luger.
His bullet whined harmless from her armor. And blue flame jetted past his shoulder. A jolting shock hurled him aside against the wall. Half blind, dazed, he slapped at his burning shirt, and reeled back to meet the remaining ants.
Four were left. His staggering lunge caught one. And another fell, queerly, when he had not touched it. And a hearty voice came roaring to his ears, “Fight, gang! Fight!”
