The Fury Out of Time (6 page)

“It looks like a butterfly,” Haskins said.

“I suppose so,” Alexander said, with a puzzled frown. “It looks like a butterfly, it
is
a butterfly, and yet it can’t be a butterfly. Put another way, it doesn’t look like a butterfly, it isn’t a butterfly, and yet it’s got to be a butterfly.”

“Are you sure he’s an expert?” Haskins asked Karvel.

Karvel nodded. “Stop talking nonsense, and tell Mr. Haskins what’s different about this particular butterfly.”

Alexander seated himself on the edge of the bed, bent over the box with his pocket lens, and announced in hushed tones, “It has two wings!”

“Don’t most butterflies?” Haskins asked. “They’d have a little trouble getting around on one, wouldn’t they?”

“Good God!
All
of the Lepidoptera—moths and butterfles—have
four
wings!”

“Is that so? Sounds like a good point. I’ve never paid much attention to moths and butterflies.”

“And it has only two legs,” Alexander went on. “It should have six. The thorax has only a single segment. It should have three, each of them with a pair of legs and two of them with pairs of wings. The abdomen is shortened— not just smaller, but structurally simplified, with fewer segments. The eyes—the damned eyes aren’t even compound! This is obviously a monarch butterfly, but it’s only about a fourth as large as it should be.”

“In other words,” Haskins said, “it’s a freak.”

“Freak
isn’t strong enough. It’s a dratted monster!”

“Abnormalities occur in all living things. Man has two legs, but babies have been born without legs. A butterfly with only two wings—”

“It isn’t that kind of abnormality,” Alexander protested. “It isn’t a butterfly with two wings missing. It’s a butterfly with a single pair of wings shaped and adapted to do the work of two pair.”

“All right. You’re the expert, and I’m not equipped to ask intelligent questions, much less argue with you. It’s a mutation, a sport, or maybe it’s the result of a long process of evolution. Could such a mutation be induced by radiation, Professor?”

“I don’t know. I’d have to consult a geneticist.”

Haskins smiled, shaking his head. “Consulting experts is exactly like running into debt. Once you get started, there’s no end to it. I gather that you favor the mutation theory over the evolution theory.”

“I don’t remember saying so, but I suppose I do, mainly because no butterfly has ever been found with
any
of these changes.”

“The professor knows nothing about related events,” Karvel said to Haskins.

Haskins met his eyes squarely. “Are you assuming that the events
are
related, Major?”

“I am. No butterfly has ever been found with any of these changes. Suddenly one is found, with all of them, in close association with an object and an occurrence that are equally strange. Aren’t we entitled to make such an assumption?”

“I’d be the last to deny it.”

“What the devil are you two talking about?” Alexander demanded.

Haskins ignored him. “You’re entitled to make any assumption you like. Assumptions, or suppositions, or hypotheses are highly useful work animals, but for display purposes they aren’t worth a damn. Can you put your assumption to work?”

“Look at it this way. Say an airplane of unknown design crashes in the valley below Whistler’s. We don’t know where it came from, but nearby we find a butterfly that has previously been identified only in Tibet. Wouldn’t it be rational to form a working assumption that the plane came from Tibet?”

“I doubt it,” Haskins said. “I’d want a guarantee signed by the butterfly itself that it actually did come from Tibet, and hadn’t been an unnoticed local resident for years. I’d also want to know what world travelers had passed through the neighborhood recently. In actual fact, I’d probably ignore tie butterfly and concentrate on the airplane. I have a bias against assumptions involving animate objects.”

“He had a whack on the head,” Alexander said. “Are you humoring him, or what?”

“I’m humoring myself. Go ahead, Major. For the moment we’ll assume that the Tibetan butterfly proves the airplane came from Tibet. What then?” He watched Karvel closely. Either the man was better-tempered than he had any right to expect, or his self-control was impressive.

“How about it, Alex?” Karvel said. “Do you deny that this butterfly
could
be the result of a long period of evolutionary change?”

“Not really. Evolution seems to move toward simplification and specialization, and most of these changes are actually anticipated in many current species. Butterflies once had six wings, perhaps even eight. Today they have four, and the hind wings are frequently smaller and of little use in flying. Some species already have their front legs reduced to small brushes. Maybe the evolutionary trend toward a bialate, bipedal butterfly with a simplified body is already under way, but one just doesn’t expect to come face to face with the end product. Even that couldn’t account for what’s happened to this butterfly’s eyes, unless you want to say that evolution had to make them better because they couldn’t get much worse. As for your related events—”

Karvel cut him off with a wave of his hand. “The reason none of the intermediary stages of this butterfly have come to light
could
be because they haven’t occurred yet, and this butterfly hasn’t occurred yet, either. It will occur only in the future.”

“Are you sure this isn’t a mental hospital?” Alexander asked, in an uneasy aside to Haskins.

“Not today,” Haskins said, “though I’m not making any guarantee about tomorrow. How far into the future, Major?”

“Consult your friendly geneticist. A few years, a few centuries—perhaps thousands of years.”

Haskins glanced at his watch, thinking that it was time he got back to Hangar Seven. He said absently, “Continue, please.”

“I’ve finished. If a Tibetan butterfly in connection with an airplane would suggest that the plane came from Tibet, then a future butterfly, in connection with the inexplicable arrival of an inexplicable U.O., would suggest that the U.O. came from the future. As a working assumption, of course. If any inconsistencies turn up—”

“You back down easily, Major.”

“So far I haven’t been able to find a single inconsistency.”

“What about Force X? Did that come from the future?”

“In a sense. If an object smashes through a brick wall, you’ll expect to see a few bricks fly. If an object smashes through a temporal barrier, you might reasonably expect some comparable reaction.”

“A few bricks—of time?”

“Or an eddy of time. Or a whirlpool.”

“A whirlpool,” Haskins mused. “A spiral of time. I’m sorry Colonel Stubbins isn’t here. His reaction would be interesting to watch.”

“I only told you because you asked for it.”

“So I did. And having gotten it, I couldn’t complain even if I wanted to, which I don’t. Tell me this, Professor. While this future butterfly is evolving, what changes might take place in the human race?”

“What a question to ask a lepidopterologist! Oh, I vaguely recall some speculation on the subject. The man of the future may be totally bald. Vestiges such as the appendix and perhaps the tailbone might disappear altogether. There may be changes in the teeth, as one devastating result of the civilized diet. The feet will be modified by the corrosive restrictions of shoes. Experts have produced long lists of such things, but I don’t remember much about them except that they always give me the impression that I’d rather not be around to meet their subject.”

“The passenger,” Haskins said softly, keeping his eyes fixed on Karvel, “has no body hair. His feet have four toes, but his hands have five fingers. He has no teeth, and something about his jawbone has given this base’s chief dental officer nightmares. He is nearly eight feet tall. The body’s internal structure is equally interesting, though they’re having a bit of a problem in getting it reassembled for study. A smashed corpse makes a messy kind of jigsaw puzzle. The most intriguing thing thus far is that they haven’t been able to find any stomach. The clothing, incidentally, which one of my jocular experts describes as a two-piece toga with cod piece, is of a fabric not yet identified. As for the U.O., its instrumentation is so advanced that it has my experts behaving like kindergartners. It is nuclear-powered, but we haven’t been able to decide just how the power works, or what it’s supposed to do. The numerical system employed on the controls and instruments—if they are controls and instruments—is unlike any numerical system known to us. If it is a numerical system, that is. The U.O. is constructed in part of wholly unknown alloys or unknown metals or both. Your assumption—”

“Is still working,” Karvel said.

Haskins got to his feet. “You can take the butterfly with you, Professor, under these conditions. You will guard it well, you will show it to no one, and you will say nothing, either publicly or privately, about it or anything you have heard here. You will photograph it, and study it carefully, and you will write a report of which there will be only one copy that you will deliver to me personally. Have I made myself clear?”

Alexander looked crushed. “You mean I can’t publish—”

“Not now. Next month, next year, five years from now— perhaps. Have I made myself clear?”

Alexander nodded.

“As for your assumption, Major—it seems to be consistent with the facts that we have, but so would an assumption that the U.O. belongs to a previously undiscovered civilization located in the depths of the Amazonian jungle. We already have a long list of such assumptions, and if you don’t mind, I’ll keep yours on file as a last resort. It raises questions that are far more complicated than those it answers, one of them being how your flimsy butterfly managed to arrive intact when a sturdy, vertebrate, human-type passenger was smashed.”

“Now I feel better,” Alexander said. “For a moment I thought you were taking him seriously.”

“I’m in a very serious business, Professor. I take everything seriously—whether I believe it or not. I’ll be waiting for that report.”

He shook hands with both of them, and walked over to Wing Headquarters to borrow Colonel Frazier’s offce. He called his favorite Washington, D.C., number.

“Read me the file on Bowden Karvel,” he said.

He listened, puffing thoughtfully on the Professor’s cigar, and for a long time after he had hung up he sat wreathed in cigar smoke, feet planted untidily on the polished top of Frazier’s desk, thinking. When the colonel attempted to reclaim his office, Haskins waved him away irritably.

He was wondering if Major Bowden Karvel was one of the kinds of people who interested him.

He telephoned Washington again. “About Karvel,” he said. “I want him recalled to active duty and assigned to me. Never mind the medical problem. I know the man is missing a leg, and I also know that he’s hospitalized at this moment, but I want him. Immediately. Just have the order issued, and if there are any repercussions I’ll probably be finished with him before they catch up with us.” He hung up.

He doubted that Bowden Karvel would ever be able to tell him anything he wanted to know. The man’s appetite for general knowledge was too rapacious, and his interests too volatile. Haskins did not disparage those qualities, but neither did he patronize them. He knew from experience that when he wanted information a brilliant amateur was a poor substitute for a well-schooled professional.

Neither could he think of any job that Karvel might be qualified to do for him. His immediate concern was to put the major under military control, so he could order him to keep his mouth shut. If a man with his qualifications and background ever started spouting to the press about future butterflies and bricks of time, there’d be the devil to pay. To keep his mouth shut, and to keep a firm check on his awesome flights of imagination—those would be the problems.

“Though it is odd,” Haskins mused, “that his theory is the only one without an obvious inconsistency.”

Chapter 4

Professor Charles Zimmer was a mathematician, and he was expounding some obscure theory of numbers to Gerald Haskins. Bowden Karvel, seated nearby in a wheel chair, listened absently and wondered if Haskins understood what the professor was talking about. Karvel did not.

In Karvel’s lap lay a stack of photographs of the U.O’s interior. Uppermost was a close-up of the central feature of a strange, bafflingly simple instrument panel.

“How about ‘positive’ and ‘negative’?” Karvel asked suddenly.

The professor’s smile spread over his plump face in concentric wrinkles. He took the photograph. “If that were so,” he said, “the symbols on either side of the norm could be reasonably expected to exhibit similarities. In fact, they should be identical. I consider these symbols as representing a scale of regularly changing values, but whether it should be read from left to right, or vice versa, I would not even hazard a guess. Without some understanding of the function of this gadget, I am not even prepared to state positively that the symbols relate to numerical values.”