Robert Lionel, page 1
Time Echo
Robert Lionel
1964
Chapter 1
The November wind bit with cold, savage intensity, as it whistled round the ancient houses-houses so old that their very style of architecture was lost in the mists of antiquity.
Within the boundary of what had been the prehistoric Brandenberg, the tiny townships fifty miles to the northwest of the ancient German capital of Berlin had beeD.
largely passed by. The savage, soulless armies of Rajak the Magnificent, dictator of Eurasia, had found little in that historic comer that was considered wocthy of plun-der. From Perleberg to Pritzwalk, from Whistock to Kyritz and Havelberg, life continued in much the samc pattern as during the last thousand years. Governments had changed, dictators had come and gone, the ghastly three-cornered fight between the major powers had raged, with and without atomic interludes, for nearly twenty years-but that was two centuries ago. Now there was peace, if such a subsistence as had clamped itself down over the whole area could be caned "peace."
Rajak himself was a strange individual,a giant, austere demi-god or demi-devil, dependingg upon a man's political convictions. By his own inner party of supporters, this strange, aloof, thinking machine of a man was regarded as a savior whose excellence exceeded even that of Jesus of Nazareth. To the vast majority of his "saved"
subjects, Rajak was delineated as something out of the pit of hell. He was the great beast, the aggressive, murderous monster.
A very remote observer would, perhaps, nave found something in favor of his. legislation It terminated anything m the nature of mterstate nvalry m Eurasia,in the same way that the coming of the Norman Kings and the production of the Domesday Book had ended the petty Anglo-Saxon rivalries of prehistoric EnglRnd. But in that northwest corner of Brandenberg at 53.5 degrees N by 12
degrees E there existed a kind of transient paradise, a corner of an ancient civilization, like a living monument to the past. And yet a few thousand simple townsfolk and outlying rustics, who inhabited the land between the little townships, knew, deep down within themselves, how pre carious their existence was, and all the time there hung over them, like the sword of Damocles, a great fear that the full attentions of Rajak the Magnificent would be focused on to the tiny, partially explored comer of his multimillion square mile empire.
There were strange doings beneath the streets of Perleberg. Ancient cellars had been enlarged into a network of honeycombed secret passages that would have done justice to the long-dead denizens of the catacombs.
And if there was any shape or form of organized resistance to Rajak, it was here, beneath these ancient cobbled streets" that that resistance was concentrated.
Whispers spread, even through the great Eurasian empire, and if any of Rajak's victims ever escaped from tho dreaded security guards, it was to PerJeborg that they fled.
The jet was old. To be precise, it was nearly three centuries old. Mike Grafton had found it purely by chance in a hangar that had miraculously escaped bomb damage of a prehistoric war. Vast piles of dusty rubble had covered the hangar, and there, in that isolation of man-made wilderness, Grafton, fleeing desperately from the pursuing security men, had stumbled across the entrance to the hangar
Despite their super-electronic probes, their stellar vision intercoms, and the thousand and one relentless devices by which the security forces ferreted out Rajak's enemies, Grafton had gone temporarily undiscovered. He lay low, surviving on a few scraps of food that he had brought with him, until hours turned to days and days into a week. He felt certain that the security men had temporarily called off the pursuit. . . .
He was a tall, well-built man, was Grafton, with dark, penetrating eyes and black curly hair. His muscles were hardened to steely whipcord by months of rough living.
They rippled on his powerfully built frame. His mind was as quick as the brain of a fox. He had learned his scout-craft in the hard school of do-it-right-or-die. Like an old fox, Grafton knew all the tricks of a pursued man, and like a young fox, he had speed and agility, which enabled him to carry out his subterfuge, and fast, daring moves, moves that meant the difference between life and death; between light and darkness; between freedom and extec-mination.
He felt' the wind whistling round him as he looked from the doorway of his ruined hangar to the south of the ancient rail town of Rhinow. Less than two miles to the west he could see the broad expanse of an island lake, and away to the north of him the ruins of an ancient canal crossed the railroad-the iron tracks overgrown and rusted almost beyond recognition. He stepped out into the freezing November air, and from the heavy pack on his back began selecting a bundle of deadly sticks. . . an essential part of his saboteur's stock in trade. Among his many other nefarious pursuits, Mike Grafton was an explosives expert. In the superb destructive technology of the 24th century, explosives were one of the finest arts practiced by man. He looked at the rubble, and he looked at the ,hangar door. His brilliant mind made a series of rapid calculations; calculations that took in blast, shock wave and clearance direction. And as he calculated, he began planting the deadly little sticks. He checked the time fuses carefully, and then began to walk swiftly to the south. On the brow of a little hill, beneath the rubble of what had once been a very stalwart wan, he lay flat and began counting the seconds before the explosion. Even at that distance, his index fingers pressed firmly into his ears and he crouched, with every muscle tensed, as he waited for the dull reverberation which would prove to him whether or not his calculations had been correct. Even as he waited, he knew that that prehistoric jet would be his only chance of reaching Perleberg without being detected, for the security forces had already thrown their cordon
around the area, which was still marked as "semi-developed" on the huge map in their headquarters. . . .
There was a low rumbling in the distance; a rumbling which grew to a mighty roar as chro.ge after charge picked up its message of exploding violence. And then there was nothing to be seen but a vast cloud of rubble and dust. He waited a few minutes till the vast cloud settled, wondering as he waited whether it would bring the security forces around his ears, like a pack of angry and destructive'
hornets.
That was something that would have to be chanced.
The dust was clearing now, and he began running purposefully in the direction of the buried hangar. As the last of the debris floated back to earth, he realized with a wildly beating heart that his calculations must have been the best he had ever made. The thought crossed his mind that it is very often dark necessity which brings the best out of a man. It tempers his innate abilities and focuses his powers.
The hangar lay wide open before him. In front of it. a rough rubble-strewn track opened out. between an avenue of bomb-damaged houses and mounds of blackened.
stunted vegetation. He was reminded of the fantastic stories he had heard of the long-dead city of Pompeii, and of how the volcanic ash had protected and preserved everything within it. Such was the case here. The ancient jet might have been left there only yesterday. Now the way to freedom lay open before him. Whether or not any of its chemical fuel remained was a matter for conjecture. But then. reflected Grafton, so were so many other things. It was these million-to-one chances that had saved him so often in the past. It was a wild gamble that beat the croupier on the roulette wheel: the staking of everything on one number, with thirty-three chances against it coming up. and yet it appeared. And it was a fortune. not suicide.
that awaited the gambler. Grafton had a crude stairway of boulders. bricks. packing cases and assorted debris leading up to the cockpit. He scrambled up it with urgent haste.
knowing full well that the electronic detectors of the security guards would pick up that telltale explosion all too soon. He reached the cockpit and climbed in. The ancient controls were almost unbelievably simple for the man whose mind was attuned to the technological complexities of the 24th century. He did a brief calculation, wondering what the date could be. He had been in hiding for over a week. That brought it up to November 25th. He repeated it to himself. "November 25th. 2309." Strange how dates.
how time itself. were almost meaningless to a man on the run. Yet he liked to keep track of them. It was a tiny shred of normality in a frightening and abnoimal environment.
He got to work on the control panel with deft. skillful fingers. and to his delight and amazement, the engine roared into life. "Three hundreds years. almost." he whispered. "and it works. By thunder. they built things to last in those years." Whether or not his new-found airship would crash, as the pressure of that November wind cut, and shook its antique fuselage and airelons, he had no manner of knowing, but so far the miracle was paying unexpected dividends. There was no time like the present
to take the rest of the gamble. Bumping over the rubble-strewn causeway, the jet lurched out of the hangar. Time after time, as he taxied down that road, he averted disaster by inches; and yet SOOlehow the old airship hung together, and the roar of its engines grew louder as the iliJottle opened and it ga~ered speed. Straight into the teeth of that biting November gale he flew. The airelons held. He gave a great sigh of relief as the bumping gave way to the smoothness of flight. He was airborne; airborne, in a machine that had not seen the light of day for nearly three centuries, but airborne all the same. There was a wonderful feeling of freedom and exhilaration, and for just a few brief seconds his mind escaped from the toils of the knowledge that the security forces were everywhere. Here in the air, alone, piloting his own machine, he was safe, and if only fo
He opened the throttle still further. Northwest, -ever northwest, he flew, and almost before he realized it, his air-speed indicator and milometer told him that he must be within five miles of his destination. He throttled back. So far the sky was still clear. . . he throttled back still farther and began to circle in, looking for a landing. Down . . .
down. . . down. . . he took the antique jet, until it cut like a knife the tracery of the low November clouds, and the,re below him lay the city of Perleberg. Already he could feel his feet pacing those ancient cobblestones. It seemed too good to be true. It seemed that there could not have been such a loophole in the apparently inescapable network of the Eurasian powers. But here he was, flying over Perleberg, the town of mysteries; the town which, if legend spoke truly, held the secret of escape from that vile totalitarian machine which Rajak the Magnificent described as his Eurasian Utopia.
The problem was to land; to land as quietly and unob-trusively as possible; to land somewhere within reach of the town, somewhere within the deadly cordon he felt sure must surround it. And as his gaze was concentrated downwards, in his search for a landing strip in that grey November day, one of the huge anti-grav warships of Rajak the Magnifice-nt plummeted out of the sky above him, like an eagle decending on its prey. The great warship fell quite silently. There was no roar of engines to give it away. It fell like a descending thunderbolt of Nemesis; and yet somehow, just before the mODlent of destructive impact from its huge, reinforced ramming edge, that would shatter his tiny plane into a thousand fragments, Grafton glanced up and saw it. It hung over him like a huge, black, steel cloud. . . . Faster than thought he flung the jet into a screaming power dive. Lower and lower it screeched, as fast as the dropping menace- above him.
Now faster. The gap was beginning to widen, and suddenly he saw a tiny ray of hope. Surely the commander of that huge anti-grav warship wasn't going to make the one
fatal mistake which would enable his prisoner to escape
. . . surely he would realize. . . ?
The ground was hurtling up to meet Grafton. Still he kept the stick forward, and still the antique jet screeched its way earthward in a superb power dive, a breathtaking spectacle of speed and power. Less than a thousand feet separated him from the enormous warship, the huge iron-clad destruction machine above. The ground seemed frighteningly near; he was dropping at terrifying speed, dropping faster than a bullet. There were .only split-seconds in which to act. . . . He calculated his own mass, and the mass of the huge juggernaut trying to crush him out of the sky. He realized that unless some new modification, of which he was unaware, had been made in that mighty warship, then, in his excitement at the prospects of destroying this saboteur, the captain had made the fatal error. Grafton took a long, deep breath. The ground was so close that he could almost have touched it. With all the power of his arm, he yanked the ancient stick back, hop..
ing and praying that the antique machine would answer to her controls in time-that he had not miscalculated her maneuverability.
There was a terrible shuddering Vibration as he came out of the dive. He leveled up and screamed away at full speed, banking swiftly, aware of the vibration in the loosened joints of the wings and fuselage; he knew that he would be airborne for only a matter of minutes, if not seconds. Air and earth shook in a tremendous crash behind him, and glancing quickly to the starboard, he realized i that he had been right. The captain of the huge Eurasian anti-grav warship had plummeted to his death. These anti-gravs had no gliding surfaces. Like prehistoric craft, they relied purely upon their ability to move upwards and sideways very swiftly. . . . The vast and essential difference between the anti-grav warships and the pre-historic hover craft lay in their propulsion unit. The anti-gravs were not powered, except for their lateral movement.
They were like huge battleships of the sky, and their motive power lay in the shielding beneath them; shielding which worked on a series of shutters.
It had been discovered that a combination of very rare alloys, none of which was to be found on the earth itself, had the strange power of shutting off completely, and shielding from any object above them, that strange accident in the space-time continuum which terrestrial scientists had long dignified by the name of gravity. When the folding metallic shutters were closed, shielding the actual anti-grav alloy from the surface of the planet, then, like i any other heavier-than-air body, the huge battleships would sink; would more than sink-would drop like a "
stone at ever increasing speed, until the shutters were opened once more, the anti-grav took over, and the vast weight of the aerial juggernauts would become completely insignificant. The dead commander in his heap of wreckage had forgotten that it takes a certain time for the anti-grav alloy to operate. He had been insulated from all thoughts of safety, caution, or plain common sense by the possibility of destroying Grafton, or whoevec it might be in the antique ship. He had paid dearly for his indiscretion. . . . Not until it was too late had the anti-grav
shutters been snapped back to allow the alloy to operate and remove the weight of the hurtling projectile. The hurtling ship had fallen like a meteor. She and her proud crew were twisted and mangled beyond recognition on the cold grey stones. The vibrations in Mike Grafton's antique jet became increasingly more pronounced. . . .
His one thought now was not to get down in Perleberg but to get down anywhere at all . . . alive. He guessed that the security forces would be fully occupied with their shattered comrades, and that the damaged ship would command most of their attention. He hoped that in the ensuing confusion, one fleeing fugitive might sneak through the Perleberg cordon. Below him there was a wide open field.
Holding his breath, he eased the stick slowly forward, the jet nosed downwards, shuddering and coughing as she went. He knew It was only a matter of seconds now before the gallant old plane would disintegrate. . . . However, he decided, she had certainly served her purpose.
The landing wheels touched the field; he throttled back immediately, and as he did so, the port landing wheel buckled and broke. The port wing came down and snapped clean from the fuselage. The jet rolled over three times and lay like a stricken bird, smoke pouring from her gigantic exhaust. Battered, bruised and shaken, blood dripping from his forehead, Mike Grafton hung across the controls, feeling more dead than alive. He could smell the acrid fumes of the highly inflammable chemical fuels as they poured from the wreckage of the plane, and he knew that he had at most a matter of split-seconds to get clear before the whole of the debris exploded into an engulfing sea of destructive flame. His dazed fingers struggled with the strap for what seemed like hours. In desperation he tore the stout clasp knife from his pocket and slashed through the thick leather. He was free. He was out. He was staggering away across the field, ten yards. . . twenty
. . . thirty. . . . He was fifty yards away from the hot, smoking, stinking, wreckage, when there came a roar of thunder and the jet disintegrated in a great sheet of flame.
Behind him in the distance he saw running figures, and those sombre grey uniforms told him 'without a second glance that these were the dictator's security forces.
Battered and shaken as he was, he ran with the mad strength of desperation. He ran as Horatius once swam
. . . in Macaulay's famous poem:
"Never, I ween, did swimmer in such an evil case, Struggle through such a raging flood, safe to the landing place."
He made it; made it to the ancient city wall, with hiS
grey uniformed pursuers less than a hundred yards behind.
He could hear the crackling staccato echo of their small arms as the electronic bolts from their hand guns flashed and smoked through the walls around him. At any second he expected a lncky shot to stretch him helpless in a heap of blistered flesh, at the feet of his ruthless pursuers. He only hoped that if they did hit him, it would be completely fatal, for he had no wish to fall alive into the hands of Rajak's secret police.
