Time Travel Omnibus, page 184
“By the same token I am anxious to begin the examination of my own finds. Beside the twentieth century individual I have a female. Just think of that!”
Flaton flung around to Stratton and Elaise. “To the laboratory,” he repeated the thought, making of it a command. “At once!”
His leveled ray-gun drove them before him, across the frozen lava of the stockade’s floor, in through a high portal in the shimmering metal side of the structure at its center.
A pale blue luminance lit the interior, and the space seemed filled with a pounding, mechanical throbbing. Some sort of machine bulked before Stratton. No part of the complicated device moved, yet somehow it seemed instinct with the same sort of life as had animated the fabric of the stratocar.
THE door of the laboratory was narrow. Stratton went through first. In a larger chamber he glimpsed curious racks on which gleaming instruments were ominously ranged, high panels studded by glowing lights, a maze of tangled cables.
There was something terrifying about all this, some aura of the same dispassionate cruelty he had felt, once, in the experiment room of a naturalist friend whose skinned frogs and guinea-pigs had twitched to the galvanic false-face of searching electrodes’. They had been bundles of gory flesh, like the scarlet horror on a table near a second door in the farther wall. But that was—that had been a man!
“No,” Elaise groaned, behind him. “No. I will not—” Her voice choked off.
Stratton whirled. The girl was writhing in the grip of Flaton’s macabre weapon, her dear face twisted out of all semblance to humanity by the torture Stratton himself had found unendurable.
The cylinder’s green nimbus blinked out and he caught Flaton’s grim order. “Disrobe, or you shall feel the agony again. Strip off your garb, female.”
Flaton’s great eyes flicked to Stratton, and the youth read his appalling intention. Wrath lightninged through him, obliterating fear. He left his feet in a long low dive, his arms flailing ahead of him in a desperate stab at the future-mans spindly legs.
Because instinct, and not thought, inspired that mad attack, Flaton was not warned of it in time to bring his weapon to bear on the berserk youth. Stratton’s shoulder crashed against the fellow’s frail limbs. They snapped at the impact, and Flaton went down under the mad charge. Paper-thin bones crunched under his blow. Abruptly he realized he was pummeling a squashed thing that did not move, a thing out of which all life had expired.
“Ronny,” Elaise was crying. “Here, Ronny. His wand of magic!”
Stratton pushed himself erect, shuddering now with revulsion from the touch of that which had been the fruit of all mankind’s long travail, shaking still with the fury that had fired him to his unexpected triumph. Elaise was thrusting at him the black cylinder of the disintegrator ray. He snatched it from her, found the thumb-button that would release its fearful energy.
Somewhere outside someone called: “Flaton! Come quickly. I need your help. The barbarians attack us!”
CHAPTER IV
THE SIEGE OF THE PRIMITIVES
WHAT now?” Stratton groaned, twisting to the door. The portal, sliding open, revealed Talus, waving filamentary arms in a paroxysm of apprehension.
“Hold it,” the American said grimly. “As you are! If you move, I’ll ray you!”
“Flaton—dead—incredible! He has the ray-gun!” Talus’s thoughts were a jumble of astonishment at the pulped remnant of his companion, of terror of the weapon Stratton held. “He will disintegrate me before I can draw my own. Defeated—from within and without. I should not have come—”
“Damn right you shouldn’t,” Stratton interjected. This telepathy business had its points, he thought. He knew he was master of the situation now. “What’s going on out there?”
“Our screen scans the plain for a half-mile around. I have seen them approaching—the barbarians. They are converging on all sides. They will destroy us.”
“That’s lovely! How about our getting away in the stratocar?”
“I do not know how to navigate it.”
“That means we’ve got to fight them off. Can we?”
“One man on each side of the wall, with our weapons we should have been impregnable. But you have killed Flaton—”
“Never mind that. I’ll make a dicker with you. You take one side, I’ll take the other. You ought to be smart enough to see that we’ve got to play fair with each other or we both lose out. How about it?”
“Done!”
Stratton couldn’t distinguish any reservation in the man’s mind. Not just now. Afterwards he might change. “Are there any more of these ray-guns around?”
“Another in the cabinet to the left. That one—”
“Elaise,” Stratton threw over his shoulder. “There’s a magic wand, as you call it, in that closet on this side of me. Get it. You work it by pushing that little thing on its side. You come out with us, stay in the center of the blockade and don’t take your eyes off this beauty. If you hear him think anything even a little bit hostile to me or you, let him have it. All the way down!” Then, to Talus, “You get that, don’t you?”
“I understand.” He was thoroughly cowed. “I shall give her no cause to disintegrate me. But we must hurry, or they will be over the wall.
“Let’s go!”
THERE were steps in the sides of the stockade wall. Atop it was a runway protected by a rampart. If there were only four of the future-men, Stratton thought, they must have been here a long time to have built this fortress. Then he saw that it was of the same glass-like consistency as the floor within. He tested the ray on it.
Its button pushed halfway down, the green halo formed around its end, but there was no visible effect on the fused rock. A little further. The green deepened to a brilliant dazzle that extended in a tight beam to the spot at which he aimed. The stone glowed red, then white. It melted, ran in little streamlets down the slick sides of the little wall. That was what they had done! They had melted the solid stone to make their lair.
“Gosh!” Stratton exclaimed, “Just think what full power would do to a man!” Then he recalled that he had seen just that? But he was forgetting what he was here for.
He could just see over the rampart. The piebald space outside was vacant. As far as his vision reached, nothing moved. Had Talus tricked him? A swift glance over his shoulder showed him the future-man across the small space, peering intently over the barricade on his side. Elaise was tense beside the stratocar, her gaze un-waveringly on their strange ally, the ray-gun clutched in her small hand and focused on him. Admiration surged up in Stratton. She might be untaught, superstitious, but there was nothing lacking in her courage!
A tiny clink of metal against stone spun Stratton around. Had something dodged behind that boulder, out there?
Twanng! A harp-note sounded somewhere. Something zipped through the air, thudded against the rock wall below him. Again—twanng!—zzzip—thud! This time it struck sparks from the rampart-top a foot to Stratton’s left, fell over onto the foot-way. It was an arrow, flint-tipped. The American ducked below the shielding stone, looked from the dart to the cylinder he held. Ages between these two weapons—but that arrow also could kill, and without a target his ray was useless.
His careless exposure of himself had given some marksman his range. Stratton ran, crouching low, along the wall. Popped up for another look. A shambling Dawn-man, pelt-girdled, dodged out from behind a rock, his ferocious countenance more bestial than human. The fellow poised a flint-tipped javelin for the throw. Stratton took snap aim, thumbed his ray-gun’s trigger. The dart-hurler whiffed into nothingness.
Revulsion twisted at the pit of the American’s stomach, horror at the thing he had done. This death he dealt was worse than death itself. The most savage of warriors buried their dead and their enemy’s dead, but he was leaving nothing to bury.
A wail rose into the dimness, hollow and somehow eerie with its keening of the dreadfully dead. A flaxen-haired youth, in leather jerkin and forest-green breeches, was suddenly visible. His longbow was stretched to the tip-point of a feathered arrow and his keen, eager eyes scanned the wall for a mark. Stratton’s arm jerked up—but he could not bring himself to press the lethal button.
“Wait,” he yelled. “Wait!” There was in him some inchoate realization that the bowman was far nearer kin to him than the callous man of the future, that they two should be fighting shoulder to shoulder in a common cause. “Wait! I—”
The twang of the loosed bowstring cut him short. His ray caught the arrow in midair, sparked it into non-existence. The beam melted a lurid, angry pit just in front of the archer, and the yellow-headed Saxon sprang back to safe concealment.
IF he could only get them to listen, Ronald Stratton thought desperately; if he could only get them to understand that he was not of the people who had come there to capture them and torture them.
Metal clanged, out there, and abruptly another figure was striding through the fantastic landscape of the Timeless Zone. A mailed knight, helmeted and visored, he came on jauntily, secure in the gleaming armor he could not deem other than invulnerable. His great, two-handed sword flashed bloodily in the fading light.
“Hey, you,” Stratton called. “Hold up. Listen a minute. I don’t want to kill you. Listen to me!”
The knight did not pause as he bellowed, “Ho, caitiff! Though thou art craven, Sir Sanguinor yields thee no quarter. Defend thyself!”
“You damn fool! Stratton snarled, exasperatedly. “I want to—” The dazzle of Talus’s weapon hissed past him. Out there, where the knight had been, a pockmark in the plain glowed redly, a molten pockmark where a gallant man-at-arms was dispersed into myriad scattered atoms.
“Ronny,” Elaise screamed. “Ronny.”
Stratton twisted to her. An ape-visaged aborigine, gigantic, was bringing down a great, stone-headed mace to demolish the shrieking girl. Stratton’s flashing beam caught him, blasted him into extinction. The American left the rampart in a great leap, thudded down beside the cringing girl. A chorused jabbering of rage pulled his gaze to the farther wall. Forms were surging over it. Ravening, beastlike forms.
The American knew now that the die was cast. No chance for a truce now, for talk. The future-man’s ray swept clear the crowded wall. Swept it clear of swarthy, runted Picts; of long-haired, long-bearded dwarfs of the ancient moors; of all the surging, fierce apparitions of a dreamlike past. But others, and still others, took their place: Roman legionnaires, shaggy-bearded Druids, archers who might have fought with Henry of Navarre at Poictiers, a longbowman in the forest green of Robin Hood’s gay band. Indomitably they came an, and the silent death of Talus’s fearful beam scythed them into oblivion.
A hurled spear ripped Stratton’s thigh, sent agony searing through him. An arrow sliced his scalp. Talus gave vent to a high, piercing scream. A swift glance showed that his left arm was carried away. Grotesque, incredible in the gathering darkness, he carried on.
“Nerve!” the American exclaimed. “By jingo, he’s got nerve!” A thrill ran through him, a tingling thrill of pride in the Race. All of these weirdly assorted participants in the uncanny, nightmare struggle staged in the dying luminance of an outer world were somehow ennobled by that high quality of courage. Ape-man from the fens of the immemorial past, Jute and Druid and knight, Roman and hook-nosed Norman seaman, girl of the sixth century, man of the twentieth, man of the four hundredth—not one of them craven. Above them all fluttered the pennant of bravery that in all the ages must distinguish man from beast.
SUDDENLY the battle was over. Suddenly there were no longer any more attackers for the fearful ray to smite with its green oblivion. Ron Stratton slumped wearily, exhausted, feeling the agony of his wounds.
“They’re licked, Elaise,” he gasped. “They’re licked.” Not the least uncanny feature of the uncanny fight was that, now that it was ended, so little remained to show that there had been a fight. “All gone,” Stratton groaned. “All—”
“You’re wrong,” Talus’s message squealed in his brain. “There are still others of them out there. I can sense their presence, though they are too far off for me to make out their thoughts.” The fellow swore softly.
“The devil!” Stratton pulled himself to the rampart again, peered out once more into the tumulus whence the savage raid had come. Silence brooded, gravelike, among the fantastic rocks. It was a dead world he looked at, shrouded in a mournful dusk. A dead, unpeopled world. “I don’t see anyone.”
“They are there, nevertheless,” he heard. “Hidden to plot a new attack—” That thought broke off; another, took its place. “At last! Gershon and Frotal—”
The thought blanked out, Talus had coiled it, but a whirring sound, faint, out of the almost lightless sky, came to Stratton.
The two missing future-men were coming back.
CHAPTER V
THE PRIMITIVES TAKE THE CRATER
STRATTON saw suddenly a tremendous reaching beam arc against the vault of the maroon-shaded sky; saw a rock flick from its end to hurtle and crash devastatingly against the stockade’s facade.
This was a catapult, he realized, a Roman catapult, heavy artillery of Caesar’s legions. Some military genius was directing the siege. But the future-man was equal to the new threat. The catapult’s huge throwing beam flared suddenly into flame as the disintegrator ray struck it.
Above that pillar of fire, high above and miles distant, a glowing speck showed against the deep maroon of the sky. The same electric shimmer flowed in the skin of Flaton’s stratocar. If only Stratton knew how to fly that—
What good, while Frotal and Gershon were aloft to ride him down? Better death at the hands of the barbarians than what they would do to Elaise and himself. Stratton’s arm jerked up, brought to bear pointblank on Talus’s spidery form. He pressed the button halfway.
The future-man was rigid, quivering in the clutch of that dreadful force.
“Take his wand, Elaise,” Stratton yelled. “Quick.”
No words sounded in his brain, telepathed from the future-man, but pain and terror impacted there in a chaos of transferred anguish. The girl sprang unhesitantly up the steps to the runway. Stratton flicked off his beam for the instant she needed to snatch away Talus’s ray-gun, flicked it on again as Elaise turned questioningly toward him.
“Get into the thing in which we came here,” was his next order, “And watch the hole in the wall. If anyone starts to come through, ray him down.”
“Aye, Ronny, my love,” she answered him. “I haste to do thy will.”
“Now, you,” Stratton addressed Talus, aloud.
“Which way shall I move my thumb, up or down? Will you do just as I say, or do I blot you out?”
There was acquiescence in the message that came to him, cringing, tortured appeal. Stratton relaxed. “Come down and turn off the machine in there that holds up the stratocar.”
“But you’ll kill them,” the agonized protest reached him. “They will fall.”
“That’s just what I’ve got in mind. Going to do what I say, or do I start with you?”
Talus’s actions replied for him. He was scrambling down the wall. Stratton leaped down, kept right behind him. The future-man shambled into the powerhouse. The American threw a quick glance up into the sky. That ominous flier was nearer, much nearer. Shadowy forms were moving out there on the plain. All the sinister forces of this sinister land were closing in.
“Watch it, Elaise,” he called and followed Talus into the building. “Hurry up,” he flung at the cowed creature. “Turn it off.”
The whir of the approaching flier came to him, high and angry now, like the irate whir of a worker bee whose hive is being attacked. Talus did something—and the whir was gone.
Stratton faced about. Through the open door he could see the sky. A star fell, leaving a long wake of electric flame behind it. The plain spurted a fountain of sparks, green and red and golden. Then there was only darkness out there?
ONLY darkness and the long darting flares from Elaise’s ray-guns as she fought off the oncoming hordes. Killing, killing. God, how weary he was of killing! Those poor fellows didn’t know what it was all about. They knew only that strange creatures had come here to capture and torture and slay—and that they must fight to save themselves. Stratton jerked around.
“Turn on the power again.”
Talus obeyed, thinking, “It won’t do any good. The scientists are gone. No one, now, is left who knows how to fly the stratocar. The charges of the ray-guns will soon be exhausted and then—the end.”
“Oh, yeah?” Stratton gritted. “I’ve got an idea. Come on, let’s get into the flier and try it out.”
“Ronny,” Elaise screamed. “The Wands hath lost their magic. We are lost.”
“Coming, honey. Coming.” He grabbed Talus by his one remaining arm, fairly hauled him to the flying machine, threw him into it, leaped in after him. He remembered the motions of Flaton’s arms that had closed and opened the hatchway. Clumsily he imitated them. Elation leaped up in him as the hatch cover slid closed.
He twisted. Talus lay almost unconscious on the floor. Elaise stood above the future-man, staring fearfully at the view-screen above the control levers. Mirrored in it was the breached wall of the stockade; through the gap, Stratton could see the dusk-shrouded figures crawling in, always in. Till the last man was gone they would persist in their attack, not intelligent enough to realize how hopeless it was.
“Talus,” Stratton shouted. “You think you don’t know how this thing works, but you must have been in them often. You must have watched the pilots manipulate them, and what you saw is deep down in your subconscious. Don’t think. Don’t try to remember. Just try to picture Flaton, for instance, at some moment he was taking off.”
“I cannot,” the fellow’s despairing whimper came to him. “I cannot remember.”
