Bearing an Hourglass (17 page)

“You control time, Chronos; that seems to overlap into space, but that is not strictly the case. You travel by standing still and permitting the world to pass by you in selected fashion. I can control space, for evil is everywhere. You can range to the ends of Eternity; I can range to the ends of the contemporary universe. This is what I offer you—travel in the universe, such as you have never known and can not know on your own. Let Me show you—a sample of what I offer in exchange for the token favor I ask. I am sure you will agree it is a bargain.”

A bargain? Travel far beyond Earth was impossible, since magic was associated only with solid matter, like gravity, but did not have the infinite range of gravity. Five thousand miles or so above Earth, there was no magic—not until a person stepped onto some other planet and drew on
its
magic Satan himself would have to use a matter transmitter to visit Mars or Venus.

Therefore this had to be an empty promise, a bluff.

Norton decided to call Satan’s bluff. “Yes, show me.”

–7–

Satan gestured—and suddenly Norton was zooming out through space at an accelerating rate that left the planet Earth far behind in a moment, and then the sun itself. He was in deep space, light-hours from his home planet, heading toward the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, watching the stars streak by. He had no discomfort; he seemed to be magically protected, so that he felt pleasantly warm and could breathe; evidently the cloak was protecting him.

He had called Satan’s bluff—and it hadn’t been a bluff! How was that possible? Had he misunderstood the limitations of magic? It certainly seemed so!

There were moments of darkness as he passed through bands of galactic dust. Then he was in a channel of starless space, sliding along a glowing spiral arm of the galaxy, the individual stars shining along its curving length like jewels. He looked up and saw a globular cluster of stars passing overhead, a bright ball orbiting the center of the galaxy at right angles to the plane of the great disk of it. Then he curved up toward that cluster, departing the galactic plane, spiraling in. The tiny cluster swelled enormously, becoming a miniature galaxy-ball itself, with
something like a hundred thousand closely packed stars. What a spectacle!

As he came toward it, he decelerated. He entered it—but now it was evident how large it was—many light-years across, the stars thinning out at the edge, so that there really was a good deal of space between them. He coasted on in toward the center, where day was eternal and stars virtually rubbed elbows. He came at last to a magnificent space station shaped like a giant spoked wheel, with tiny spaceships docked around the rim. But as he slowed and came closer, he discovered that these ships were not small, but large; the scale of the station dwarfed them. They were of many types, some being as sleek as needles, others resembling Earthly battleships floating in space, complete with layered armor and projecting cannon, and still others resembling collections of saucers.

It was to one of the needles Norton finally came. He phased through the hull in ghostly fashion and landed on a deck in what he took to be the control region. Windows or screens opened out to provide a panoramic view of the wheel station, the docked ships, and the myriad stars shining beyond.

A spaceman got up from the pilot’s seat. He was tall, lanky, blond, and handsome in a rugged prairie way; his legs bowed out slightly and he wore a blaster at his hip, holstered for a rapid draw. He eyed Norton appraisingly, a stalk of timothy grass projecting from the corner of his mouth. “So you’re my co-pilot,” he drawled, his lips thinning. “You shore don’t look like much, stranger! Any good with a blaster?”

“No,” Norton confessed. What had Satan gotten him into?

“Ever blast any buggers?”

“What?”

“Bems.”

“Bems?”

“You know—the Bug-Eyed-Monsters who’re trying to take over the Glob. The Geniuses hired us to clean the Bems out of this sector of space. I lost my co on my last
mission, but they said they’d send a replacement.” He grinned boyishly and chewed on his timothy. “I was sorta hoping for a Femme.”

“Femme?”

“Pardner, where you been? You don’t know what a Femme is? A human woman, or reasonable facsimile thereof, maybe twenty years old, shaped like that sand dingus you’re holding, hot-blooded and not too smart.”

“Oh. There must be a mistake. Not only am I not a—a young female—I also know next to nothing about spaceships or monsters or Geniuses.”

“A mistake for shore!” the spaceman agreed. He hawked disgustedly, looked about, found no spittoon, and finally swallowed it. “We’ll get this here nonsense cleared pronto!” He strode to a communications console and punched buttons with his dirty thumb.

A head appeared on the screen. The face was small and squeezed together, as if shoved aside by the hugely bulging braincase. The skull was hairless and traversed by purple veins and seemed almost to pulse with the overcapacity of gray matter it enclosed. This, surely, was a Genius—the end product of human evolution, virtually all mind and no body.

“Yes?” the head whispered. It seemed the vocal cords, too, had been largely displaced by brainstuff.

“Bat Dursten here, sir,” the spaceman drawled. “My new co-pilot just moseyed in—but he says he don’t know nothing about ships or blasters or Bems, and he shore don’t look like much. Sending him—that musta been a glitch. I need a replacement pronto—maybe a nice li’l Femme.”

“There is no error, Dursten,” the Genius whispered sibilantly. “Norton is to be your companion for this mission. He is competent.”

“But he’s a greenhorn!” the spaceman protested. “Never even blasted a Bem!”

“He will suffice,” the Genius insisted, the veins in his forehead turning deeper purple.

“Gol-dang it, sir—” Dursten started rebelliously.

But something strange was happening. The Genius was staring with his two bloodshot orbs intently at Dursten—and the spaceman’s hair was lifting as if drawn by an unseen hand. Smoke began to curl from it, and his timothy wilted.

Dursten felt the heat. “Ow!” he yelled as he slapped at his hair, spitting out the grass. “Okay, okay, sir; he’s the one! We’ll make do somehow.”

“I rather thought you would see it my way,” the Genius said, smiling with his little pursed mouth as he faded off-screen.

“What happened?” Norton asked, amazed at this interchange. He could see a dark patch where the man’s hair had frizzed.

“Aw, he used his psi on me,” Dursten said, rubbing out the last of the heat. “They do that when they get riled.”

“Psi?”

“Don’t you know
nothing?
All the Geniuses got psi power. They can’t do nothing with their spindly li’l bodies, so they do it with their hotshot brains. That one tagged me with telekinesis and pyro. Just his way o’ making his point. I’m stuck with you.”

“He lifted your hair and burned it—by sheer mind power?”

“That’s what I said, Nort.”

“But he wasn’t even present! He must be somewhere else on the Wheel.”

“Somewhere else in the Glob, you mean. Geniuses don’t never risk their hides in space. Distance don’t matter none to them; if a Genius can see you, he can tag you. If he’d been really mad at me, he’da stopped my heart.”

“If the Geniuses can do that, why do they hire mercenaries?” Norton asked. “They should be able to stop the hearts of the Bems themselves.”

Bat Dursten sighed. “You really
are
a greenhorn! Okay, since I’m stuck with you, reckon I’d better fill you in on the scene so you’ll be able to cover my flank. The Geniuses share the Glob—that’s this star cluster here—with the
alien Bems. Things have been quiet for a century or two, but now the Bems are getting grabby. They rustled several human planets, raped the women, ate the men, and did mean things to the kids. They’re trying to take over the whole dang Glob! Naturally the Geniuses don’t like that—but Geniuses won’t never leave their plush cells deep in their planets for nothing. So they’ve got to hire more regressive types of human critters like us. They pay pretty well, and I reckon it’s a good cause, so we’re for hire. Me, I sorta like blasting Bems anyway; wouldn’t want none o’ them to get fresh with my sister, for shore! But Bems are immune to the Genius psi, so we got to use old-fashioned weapons. Which is okay by me; real men don’t use psi. We’re massing for a big battle now; we’re going to raid a Bem planet and give them buggers a taste o’ their own snake oil.”

Norton was getting the picture, but still had trouble with an aspect of it. “The Bems—if they’re really bug-eyed monsters, their metabolism must be quite different from ours.”

“That’s for shore!” the spaceman agreed readily. “They’re a cross atween bugs and cuttlefish, with huge eyes all over and tentacles and slime dripping. Real yucky!”

“Then how could they have any sexual interest in human women? Surely the women would be as repulsive to the Bems as the Bems are to the women.”

Dursten scratched his tousled head. “Now that there’s a puzzle, now I think on it. But it’s a fact that Bems always chase Femmes, ’specially the luscious ones in bikinis. We got a lot o’ pictures o’ that, so we know it’s so. If it wasn’t for us noble spacers to rescue them dolls, there’d be no luscious ones left.” He paused thoughtfully. “Strangest thing, though—some gals seem ’most as worried ’bout
us
as
them
.”

“There’s no accounting for taste,” Norton said. “I suppose if you want the girls for similar purposes—”

He was interrupted by a siren wail. Red lights flashed on the control panel.

“Yow, that there’s the campaign alert,” Dursten said.
“Get your butt into that there co-pilot’s seat, Nort. It’ll just have to be on-the-job training. I shore hope you’re a fast study.”

Norton got into the seat. Automatic safety clamps fastened him down. Dursten hit the castoff switch, and the ship dropped off its anchorage on the Wheel.

“Watch it, now. I’m throwing her into null-gee for maneuvering,” the spaceman warned. The weight left Norton; only the seat restraints kept him from floating away.

Then the ship accelerated, and he was thrown back against the seat. This needleship had plenty of power!

“One other thing I better tell you about the Bems, just in case,” Dursten said as he concentrated on his piloting, getting his ship into formation. “They’re shape-changers.”

“What?”

“You heard me, Nort. They can take any form, just like that. So if you ain’t certain, fire first.”

“But I don’t have a blaster!” Norton said. “Anyway, if I’m not sure it’s a Bem—I mean, I wouldn’t want to shoot one of our own people.”

“There is that,” Dursten agreed, as if he hadn’t thought of it before. “That’s how my last pardner got it. After I plugged him, I realized he was only green from space-sickness, but it was too late. Had to deep-space him.”

“You killed your partner?” Norton asked, shocked.

The spaceman shrugged. “I thought he was a Bem. These things happen when you got a quick trigger finger.”

Evidently so! “I hope you don’t make any similar little mistakes on this mission,” Norton said sincerely.

“Naw, no chance. You and me’s the only people on this ship. So if you see anyone else, he’s a Bem.”

“How do we know we’re not Bems? I mean, for all I know,
you
could be one, or for all you know,
I
could.”

Again Dursten paused for a new thought. His hand twitched near his holstered blaster, giving Norton a horrible scare. But then the spaceman had another notion. “Say, the robot can tell. Here, I’ll check us out now. Hey, Clankcase!”

A robot trundled up, its feet evidently held to the deck by magnetism. “You yelled, sir?” it rasped.

“Yeah, shore,” Dursten said. “Check out Nort here. Is he human or Bem?”

The robot oriented on Norton. Its body was cubistic, with a television screen where its face should be. A pair of eyes appeared on the screen, and these inspected Norton closely, though not quite in focus. A nose appeared, and this sniffed him, its nostrils flaring. A mouth formed. “Say ‘Ah,’ ” it said.

“Argh,” Norton said, suddenly realizing that if the robot decided he was a fake, he could not protect himself; he was bound to the chair.

An ear appeared, sliding to the center of the screen to listen better, shoving the other features to the side. “How’s that again?” the mouth said from the border.

“ARGHHHH!” Norton repeated clearly.

The eyes slid back to the center, squinting thoughtfully. “He’s human,” the mouth said. “Probability of ninety-eight point three-five percent, plus or minus three percent.”

“Plus or minus three percent?” Norton asked, shivering with relief. “Doesn’t that mean ninety-five point three to one-hundred-one point three percent?”

One eye drifted off the screen while the other bore unwaveringly on him. “Correct,” the robot rasped blithely.

“Well, now check Mr. Dursten.”

“Shux, I know
I’m
human!” the spaceman protested. But the machine clanked around to focus its screen face on him.

“Human,” Clankcase agreed in due course. “Ninety-six point one percent probability, plus or minus the standard three percent deviation.”