The Fury Out of Time (19 page)

“Traders,” Marnox said. “Emergency.”

They emerged in a vast tunnel, turned, and found themselves at the entrance of a room the size of a football stadium. It was a machine shop on a colossal order, and so were the machines. Mechanics swarmed over many of them, looking like ants dismantling gigantic insects.

“Do you see it?” Marnox asked Karvel.

“No,” Karvel said.

They moved slowly toward the center of the room and began to drift apart, looking searchingly in all directions. “A sphere,” Marnox kept saying. “Does anyone see a sphere?”

“Let’s not get separated,” Karvel called sharply.

“I thought it would be here,” Marnox said, “but I don’t see it.”

“Where else could it be?”

“I don’t know. Anywhere.”

“Then let’s look for it,” Karvel said.

They managed an orderly retreat, and huddled in the vast corridor. It ran straight and level, and in one direction vanished into infinity. In the other, people were milling about and a distant clamor of voices reached them faintly.

“Are we on the ground level?” Karvel asked.

“Yes,” Marnox said.

“Then that’s one of the main entrances, and the Unclaimed People are still stirring things up there. This must be where they move machines in and out of the city. Fly the aircraft along this tunnel, I suppose. Does it go straight through the city?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“There must be other workrooms.”

“That’s the only one I know about.”

“If the U.O. was brought into the city, it should be somewhere along this tunnel. All we have to do is keep looking. Suppose we split up, and search in both directions.”

“And you wait here.”

“Good idea,” Karvel said. “It’s a long way to infinity, and I’d rather not be at the opposite end of the tunnel when you find it.”

They started leapfrogging from room to room, but they had not gone a hundred feet when natives suddenly poured into the tunnel from a dozen passageways and overwhelmed them. One of the groups was cut off immediately; the other found the tunnel blocked, turned back, and was surrounded before it had taken a dozen running steps. For a short time Karvel stood unnoticed. He began to edge toward an opening where he had seen a descending ramp, but before he had covered half the distance Bribs charged out of it and blocked it off. He regarded their efforts with grudging admiration. Unlike Dunzalo, Bribun had a scheme of defense and used it effectively.

Karvel had his pistol and knife concealed under his loosely hanging native dress, but he did not want bloodshed, and the Bribs were far too numerous to bluff. As they advanced he backed away slowly. No one touched him until he attempted a belated dash for safety, and then he was seized and held firmly.

Suddenly a whirlwind of flailing arms struck his captors. He caught the flash of an orange beard as Bribs piled up in ineffective heaps. Wilurzil went down with them, but her arms continued to flail, her lethally long fingernails producing howls of pain and rage. For the moment Karvel was forgotten.

Three leaps brought him to the descending ramp. It spiraled gently downward, and he followed it at top speed. A Brib blocked the exit at the bottom. Karvel seized him, twisting an arm behind his back.

“The sphere from Galdu!” he snapped. “Where is it?”

The man screamed with pain, and fainted. Karvel dropped him and raced away. He was in a narrow corridor that lay at right angles to the tunnel above. There might be another approach to its rooms, but he would need a guide.

Two Bribs snatched at him as he ran past. He whirled, felled one with a blow, and pounded upon the other. “The sphere from Galdu. Where is it?”

Face contorted with pain, the Brib choked an unintelligible reply. Karvel eased the pressure on his arm. “Can you take me to it?”

“Yes. . .yes. . .”

“Let’s go. If you try any tricks—” He gave the arm a twist.

They moved off, Karvel keeping both of the man’s arms bent behind his back. Whenever the pace lagged he increased his pressure, with gratifying results. They ascended to the level above, and started along another corridor. Karvel could see a crowd of people beyond a distant opening. “Is that the large tunnel?” he asked.

“Yes. . .yes. . .”

“Isn’t there another way to get there?”

“Yes. . .”

“Let’s go that way.”

They turned back, but the pursuit was already on. Up a ramp, along another corridor, down again, and Karvel’s captive was so thoroughly subdued that Karvel was able to hold onto one arm and run at his side. The pursuers gained, and when they emerged both ends of the corridor were already blocked off.

The Brib halted. “There.”

“Open the door,” Karvel ordered.

A touch of the hand, and the door slid open. Karvel shoved his captive through it The U.O. stood in the center of the room.

“Close the door!” Karvel snapped.

The Brib did so, and sank white-faced to the floor when Karvel released him.

Karvel leaped to the U.O. and tried to dilate the hatch. It would not open. The U.O.’s entire outer surface had been covered with a tough, transparent, plasticlike substance. Karvel dug at it futilely, beat on the hatch with his fists.

“Major. . .Bowden. . .Karvel?” a voice said.

Karvel spun around, staring. The pronunciation was ridiculous, but the words were recognizable. A man walked forward slowly, a tall, fair-skinned man of hefty build, costumed in a queer kind of baggy overalls. He towered over Karvel, and smiled down at him.

“I’m the Overseer here,” he said. “I think it is time that you and I became acquainted.”

Chapter 5

Karvel reclined on the exquisite, billowy softness of a sausage-shaped lounge, and looked up through a transparent bubble at the alleged planet Earth—alleged because the gleaming globe in the sky bore no more than a hazy resemblance to the Earth that he knew. The continents were twisted and distorted, bloated where they should have been narrow, constricted where they should have been broad. The seas had swallowed them in great gulps, and regurgitated them where no land belonged. The first glance moved Karvel almost to tears. It was like returning home after a brief absence, and finding everything that one loved altered beyond recognition.

Or like glancing into a mirror and confronting a total stranger. He wondered if he should call himself the first of his generation to reach the moon—or the last.

The Overseer laughed softly as he occupied the adjacent lounge. “Do you enjoy the view?”

“Yes,” Karvel said, “and no. The Earth has changed so much that I hardly recognize it.”

“There is no lovelier planet in the galaxy,” the Overseer said. “To me it is always a majestic sight—an old, old world, its resources exhausted, its people ridiculously backward, yet scudding about in this obscure corner of space quite as nonchalantly as if the universe pivoted upon it In an oblique sense the universe does, you know. Earth is undeniably the birthplace of man. Tradition holds that for a long time men everywhere dreamed of returning to it, but those who did found themselves distressed even as you are distressed, and perhaps cruelly disappointed as well, for the reality was to their dreams as an insignificant grain of truth is to an enormous husk of legend. The dream and the legend were eminently more satisfying than the reality and the truth, and so eventually men stopped coming. I don’t really know if I love the old planet for what it is, or for what it once was, but I remain here, and decline loftier and less vexing appointments, and look at that lovely light in the sky whenever the cares of my office permit.”

Karvel grunted noncommittally. The cares of the Overseer’s office impressed him not at all. He had seen the luxurious moon headquarters, with its outrageously-sized female contingent that he instantly and indignantly labeled a harem. He thought he understood why the Overseer was so frequently unavailable, and why the claims of Earth’s cities went long unheeded.

He had formulated his own succinct appraisal of the Overseer’s character. The man possessed a genius for words that rendered the threadbare Earth language rich and vitally expressive. He prated poetry and oozed good fellowship, and whenever he intoned, “My friend. . .,” Karvel had to suppress the urge to reach behind him and discover where the knife had been buried.

The Overseer meant to make some nefarious use of Karvel, as soon as he could invent one that he deemed sufficiently profitable. Karvel felt certain of that, and he had no intention of waiting around long enough to find out what it would be. In the meantime, he could in good conscience advance a few schemes of his own.

At the moment he needed the Overseer far more than the Overseer needed him, so he accepted the good fellowship and pretended not to notice when he found the other studying him calculatingly.

“Have you learned anything new?” Karvel asked him.

“I have decided to leave your U.O. at Bribun,” the Overseer said, “but it will remain sealed until I personally order it unsealed. It may be that my superiors will wish a technical study to be made of it, and if so I promise that it will be done with care. You may rest secure that no one will send it. . .anywhere.”

“And. . .the other U.O.?”

“There, my friend, we have a problem. There was no other U.O.”

“That is indeed strange,” Karvel murmured, not believing a word of it. “We counted two of them.”

“My friend, I have inquired of every independent city on the planet, and of every tribe of Unclaimed People. That is what has taken me so long. Mendacity is virtually nonexistent on this planet, and even if it were not the people would not lie to their Overseer. There was no other U.O. Not in this time, in this place.”

Karvel said politely. “Then my mission is a failure. I have come to the wrong time and the wrong place.”

“Perhaps. But let us combine our knowledge and see what results. One hundred and ten Earth-days ago a pilot of Bribun sighted a strange sphere in a tract of unclaimed land far to the north of his city—some seventy air units. I have this day examined the place myself. The traces of destruction are obvious if one is looking for them, but the land is wasteland, and neither the pilot nor those who came for the sphere found them remarkable. They took the sphere to Bribun, and examined it, and inside they found messages—”

“Messages!” Karvel exclaimed. “The messages were included when the French sent their U.O. back to you, and that was the second one. U.O.-
₂
.”

“Permit me to finish my own chronology before we consider yours. Prior to this finding, the sphere was unknown to the citizens of Bribun or to anyone else in this time and this place. No—hear the rest. The Bribs could not read the messages. They did not even recognize them as messages, because written language is a lost art on this planet, but they were eager to make contact with a people who could build such a machine. It is now too late to discover all of the steps in their reasoning, but they have almost an instinctive knowledge of machines, and they easily arrived at an empirical understanding of the instrument panel. The result was that they determined to reverse certain instruments and send the sphere back to where it came from, along with an emissary. When the emissary operated the critical control the sphere vanished, which naturally astounded them. A machine of such a capability was quite beyond their comprehension.”

“Just a moment. You’re suggesting that neither of the U.O.’s originated here?”

“I am not suggesting it, I proclaim it. I am positive that they did not. The Bribs saw no reason to consult their Overseer either before or afterward about a private matter that could concern only Bribun, but I am satisfied that your U.O.’s were unknown in this time and this place until the one arrived with the messages.”

Karvel said incredulously, “Then my arrival was the second?”

“Wait. The second arrival occurred forty Earth-days after the first. Again, by miraculous good fortune, the sphere did no serious damage. It appeared in the grazing lands of Merrun, where live one of the three groups of meat eaters remaining on Earth. It killed only a few of their animals. Because it was a strange machine, and because the Bribs’ craft with machines is justly celebrated, the Merrs sent to Bribun for advice. Bribun offered compensation for the dead animals, and in return received the sphere. That second sphere contained a dead passenger, though for reasons you will understand the Bribs learned very little about him. The remains were cremated with all of the reverence that the Bribs extend to their own dead, and the ashes returned to the soil.”

Karvel bowed his head and murmured,
“And strange-eyed constellations reign his stars eternally.
Adieu, Phineas Ostrander.” He said slowly, “You may not realize it, but you’re describing a paradox.”

“In what way?”

“The U.O. that we sent out first arrived here second. The U.O. that we sent out second arrived here first. But continue, please. Obviously Bribun returned that second sphere with another emissary.”

“Immediately. They were much concerned about the possible fate of the first.”

“They sent out another without any thought as to why our emissary died?”

“They thought, of course, but they did not think to do anything about it. And that, my friend, is as much as I can tell you. The U.O. did not originate in this time and this place. There were two arrivals here, and two sendings or departures, and your own arrival was the third. Now I would very much like to share your knowledge. I trust that you are positive that the U.O. did not originate in your time and place?”