Polarian-Denebian War 1: The Time Spiral

by Jimmy Guieu

  The Lemurian girl whose clothes had been torn off got a short cape from her comrade. She wrapped it around her waist to pull herself together. Combing one hand through her hair she tried to smooth out her blonde waves. Her transparent helmet must have been torn off when she fell into the hands of the cyclops. Her comrade and the three men had kept theirs.

  Kariven stared hard at her before exclaiming, “But this is the young blonde woman we saw on the screen talking with the giants!”

  Streiler and the others scrutinized her and had to agree.

  The young woman seemed to be listening to their thoughts and she smiled. She said a few words to one of the Lemurians who took off his helmet and handed it to her. She adjusted it on her head, closed the chinstrap and played her fingers over the transparent material. The mechanism immediately gave off a weird bluish light and the flexible stem vibrated silently.

  The young woman stared at Kariven straight in the eyes. He felt a strange, almost unpleasant sensation. At first hazily, then more and more clearly he felt that an alien force was doing something to his brain, in his brain. Inexplicable impulses seemed to collide with his own thoughts, which he could no longer formulate properly.

  Relax. Clear your mind. Relax.

  Kariven shuddered. He did not think this! He tried to figure out how his brain could have thought up these commands. Why would he order this young woman to relax and clear her…

  He understood right away and was amazed. These thoughts had been suggested to him by the Lemurian! There was no way they were coming from his subconscious.

  He forced himself to think of nothing and relax as he looked calmly at the mysterious survivor. She gently pressed something in the complex mechanism on her transparent helmet.

  There now, that’s better.

  This thought, clear and precise, wormed its way into the young French scientist’s brain.

  Speak slowly or just “think” to talk to me.

  Kariven was wildly excited by this parapsychological phenomenon. The girl’s thoughts came to him with extraordinary clearness. The mechanism on her helmet must have been a thought amplifier to project mental messages onto someone lacking the sixth sense. But since the Lemurians were telepathic, why did they need this device to communicate among themselves? Besides their ability to read thoughts they could also speak. Maybe they were in contact with people who, like the Earthlings from the Atomic Age, did not have this sixth sense?

  Your train of thought is too muddled. Think about only one thing at a time.

  Kariven plunged into his thought process and looked calmly at the silent young woman.

  I am not Leyla, the young woman whom you saw on the screen at the astrodome of Shâlami. I am Glanya, her twin sister.

  Although intrigued by Kariven’s silence as he just stared at Glanya, the explorers grew impatient.

  “You want to burn this pin-up doll’s face into your memory, Kariven?” Streiler joked. “Why are you two staring at each other like statues?”

  “We’re talking,” Kariven replied without taking his eyes off the Lemurian.

  “You’re… You’re talking,” Professor Harrington raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes, mentally,” Kariven droned. His reply left them dazed.

  “And what is she saying that’s so interesting?” Commander Taylor asked skeptically.

  “If you leave me alone for a minute maybe I can tell you,” the young Frenchman grumbled, getting annoyed.

  Explain to your brothers that we are exchanging thoughts in a pure state, Glanya advised.

  Kariven did so succinctly.

  Flabbergasted, they let him continue his psychic conversation, hoping to know more very soon.

  My brothers and I thank you for saving us, Kariven.

  The paleoanthropologist was not especially surprised to hear his name psychically. Glanya had easily read it in his subconscious.

  “We only did our duty. But who are you? Are you really Lemurians?”

  Glanya telepathically read the meaning of this question.

  Only by adoption. I can’t understand very well your train of subconscious thoughts. I perceive latent images of cities and beings like you but I can’t locate your place on Earth. Do you come from another solar system?

  “No, Glanya. We travel in Time and come from the Atomic Age.”

  Glanya gazed at him without hiding her surprise.

  I don’t believe it, Kariven. Our archives from the past contain no trace of an invention made in the Atomic Age capable of sending Earthlings forward in Time…

  “But… but we don’t come from the Past! We come from the Future. It’s you, Glanya, who are in Earth’s Past. A distance of 45 million years separates your epoch from ours.”

  Glanya looked completely flustered. She stammered to her companions who abruptly shared her bewilderment.

  Think slowly, Kariven. I fear I won’t be understood very well. The Atomic Age on Earth began on this continent that you call Lemuria 9,000 years ago when the races of Earth after being taught by our Instructors without their knowing, reached this stage of their evolution. If, as I have suggested, a time machine had been built at this time, we would have kept a record of it in our archives. Now, neither on Earth, which we educated in peace, nor on Bimkam, the capital planet of our own solar system, is there any evidence of such an invention.

  Kariven felt his mind reeling. How was he going to sort out this mess?

  “Listen, Glanya, We’re both victims of a misunderstanding. You Lemurians or whoever you are had peopled the Earth around the middle of the geological period called Tertiary. And we Earthlings peopled the Earth in the Quaternary period, that is more than 45 million years after you! We come from the Atomic Age of the Quaternary period. For us you are the Past. Your continent was swallowed up by the Pacific Ocean around 40 million years ago.”

  Glanya, whose astonishment was growing, translated these stunning words to her friends, before resuming her conversation with Kariven.

  I’m beginning to understand but it’s really incredible. The Lemurian Atomic Age belongs to the Past of Lemuria. And the Atomic Age you’re talking about belongs to your cycle, to your period situated in the Future for us, the Dragons of Wisdom…

  “Hold on,” Kariven broke in. “Now it’s me who doesn’t understand very well. What do you mean by Bimkam and the Dragons of Wisdom?”

  Glanya smiled and looked up to examine the sky through the cockpit of the Retro-Timeship. She searched for a few seconds, then taking Kariven’s arm spoke to him mentally while pointing at the stars.

  Do you see that star shining red next to the two smaller stars? The three of them form a tilted triangle.

  Kariven scanned the starry night but he did not recognize the constellations. The sky was obviously not the same as he could gaze upon in Paris or Las Vegas but the one visible on Earth 450,000 centuries before! At this fantastically remote time the constellations were in a clearly different position from their current disposition. He also had to give up all hope of finding stars that were absolutely unidentifiable to a human of the Atomic Age.

  This star, Glanya told him, is Katong, our sun. The giant star, which is 483 times bigger than the sun shining on Earth—but infinitely less dense—has a train of 17 planets, of which Bimkam is ours. A very old civilization is there and has spread over the whole Galaxy for millions of years. When we reach a new planet with intelligent beings less developed than us, we establish a base on the planet and educate the “natives.”

  This base is placed under the authority of a Grand Instructor who guides and manages the technicians whose mission it is to mingle with the people to civilize or improve them. For generations, even millennia, these “Dragons of Wisdom” run around the world to lead the population toward the beautiful and good. Certain particularly learned instructors, gifted with powerful, personal magnetism, are even deified by the masses to whom they have given their guidance and knowledge.

  These Grand Bimkamian Instructors—men and women—tra
vel on spaceships whose nature the native Earthlings cannot explain. That’s why the Masters, and by extension we the technicians, are called Dragons of Wisdom. In the mind of the primitives every flying machine is a dragon and its occupants, since they come from the sky, are Gods… Gods among men!

  When the races that we teach are on the good path of evolution, we leave them to their own free will and come back to our solar system. Our stay on the planet varies from several years to generations, depending on its evolutionary stage. Sometimes, when these races are morphologically like us—such is the case with Earth—we can even end up joining with the natives and creating a branch by crossbreeding the two types.

  There automatically follows a more rapid evolution and we can thus leave the “stopover” planet after a shorter period. However, in an educational category like this, we keep a permanent base for a long time before abandoning our students forever. The mixed race, therefore, stays on the planet and over generations becomes its natives.

  The countless interbreeding of races that take place in the Galaxy has provided powerful civilizing currents. Unfortunately, sometimes we leave a planet to its fate, believing that its inhabitants will keep on the path towards good and perfection, but the opposite happens. Earth is a woeful example.

  10,000 years ago when we landed on Earth the beings here were primitive. They barely knew how to work metals. We had to leave a Grand Instructor who, through his vast wisdom and the means at his disposal, was able to start a revolutionary movement among the Earthlings. His successor and those who came after managed to make the people progress to the point where they reached the “Atomic Age” after ten centuries. This all happened 9,000 years ago, she smiled mentally.

  Kariven also smiled on remembering the confusion caused by this Atomic Age situated in the Past for Glanya and the Future for himself.

  At this period the Grand Instructor and his disciples summoned a squadron of spaceships and left the Earthlings to the benefits that they could get from the nuclear power plants providing energy for all kinds of use. Obviously they could have stayed to teach the Earthlings the astronautical science so they could travel in space to other planets, but this was not their intention. For all worlds the Atomic Age is a transition period between the ancestral type and the supra-evolved type. Therefore, they left the Earthlings to improve themselves.

  It was the wrong move.

  A few scientists, starting from the industrial use of nuclear energy came to modify the principle of slow disintegration into instantaneous disintegration. The Atomic Bomb was born.

  We were very careful not to teach this method to men, hoping that if they discovered it they would not use it for harmful ends.

  A generation passed during which time this dangerous invention was used only as a controlled explosive for building dams, destroying mountains to divert the flow of rivers, etc. But one day a scientist drunk on power built A-bombs with the agreement of his government, which appointed him War Minister, he started a dreadful conflict. The conquered, under the supervision of the conquerors, pursued their own research no less secretly. We do not know exactly how it happened, but the fact is that 20 years later a new atomic war broke out. This time the two antagonists each had their A bombs and even hydrogen bombs. It was a cataclysm of unheard of violence.

  80 out of 100 Earthlings were exterminated on both sides and the centers of habitation were reduced to dust. The few surviving citizens and the Earthlings from remote villages escaped when they could and deserted these countries that became fatally radioactive. Many of them died from the radiation, others became sterile or gave birth to blind, defective offspring, unfit to perpetuate the race.

  Those who escaped the cataclysm fell back into the state of barbarism that their ancestors had risen out of. They wandered in groups through the forests and jungles and ended up living in grottoes and big trees. The primitive life resumed but the births, paradoxically, produced only cyclop monsters! A sudden mutation had been caused by the frightful atomic conflict. The Earthlings had been exposed to the radiation and their genes8 were changed; they could engender only half-human, half-animal beings of gigantic size, with red hair and an abnormally large eye in the middle of their forehead.

  This new race soon took possession of much of Lemuria, hunting in packs that howled after the few Earthlings who were miraculously spared by the war and radiation. These last survivors lived desperately in the mountains, fearing the cyclops like death, which inevitably accompanied them.

  This lasted for thousands of years, seven to be precise. One of our interplanetary groups crossing this solar system passed by Earth for a quick look without dreaming of landing because the Earthlings, they thought, must have forgotten about their original evolution. Imagine the surprise of the “Space Controllers”: there were no more cities and chaos reigned everywhere! They came back later to help the normal descendants on Earth and to chase away the cyclops. This has lasted around 900 years.

  I belong to the instructor group on Earth, Glanya concluded, and I think we’ve stopped the danger. The Earthlings have evolved again and they will soon be able to stand on their own two feet. But from now on, so that the atrocious carnage doesn’t happen again, we will watch over Earth and its people who are too prone to kill each other.

  “Your surveillance, unfortunately, will end,” Kariven sighed. “Lemuria will be… or rather was swallowed up millions of years ago by a cosmic cataclysm and you don’t know about it because it will happen 40 million years after your own existence, Glanya.”

  The young Bimkamian reflected on this and then said:

  Without this landing accident I never would have met you.

  “How did it happen?” Kariven asked.

  We were doing a reconnaissance flight to locate the cyclops tribe when our lifters broke down and we dropped over 300 feet out of the sky. We only had time to get our individual lifters working to give us air in the cockpit. Although we were saved from the crash we were still knocked unconscious by the shock. The screams of our companions being eaten alive by the cyclops snapped us out of it.

  During the crash landing the exterior hatch was opened and a bunch of cyclops got into our ship. The first jumped on our friend who was just waking up, and tore her to pieces with his fangs. The other monsters grabbed us and brought us to their camp where you saved us.

  “We’re coming up on the astrodome,” Commander Taylor announced. “I can see the runway lights. What should we do?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Kariven consulted Glanya and replied, “Land, Commander. Glanya is going to send a message and vouch for our good intentions.”

  Commander Taylor pulled the lever to reverse the anti-gravitational boosters and lowered his head. “OK, doc, we’ll get our feet back on the ground.”

  While the Retro-timeship lost altitude, Streiler observed the young Bimkamian women and their three companions with great interest. The divinely beautiful girls must have been almost six feet tall and the men well over six and a half. With their muscular chests, broad shoulders and imposing bearing they would have fit right in among the purest masterpieces of classical sculpture.

  Watching Glanya the Austrian smiled, thinking that he and his friends had mistaken these beings for Earthlings whereas they came from a solar system located 217 light years from the Earth, according to what Kariven had just translated.

  217 light years, he thought, that means around 1,275,000 billion miles!

  And continuing his monologue:

  Good old Shakespeare was barking up the wrong tree when he wrote “Fragility, thy name is woman.” Is it possible that these “fragile” and remarkably beautiful creatures had accomplished this fantastic voyage to resolve interplanetary conflicts and devote their lives to educating barbarians and savages?

  Glanya, who was watching him lost in contemplation, could not help but smile. Naturally, she had picked up his thoughts. Pressing the contacts on her helmet once again to amplify the psychic waves, she answered him by mental
suggestion and interpreting the Shakespeare quote in her own way.

  “We are not ‘fragile,’ Kurt Streiler, but the representatives, male and female, of a highly evolved race whose mission is to watch over the development of backward planets.”

  On perceiving these thoughts the Austrian engineer felt something he could not explain. To know that his brain was open to this being endowed with a sixth sense was not a particularly pleasant feeling.

  He managed a little smile to put up a front and turned away, pretending to watch the landing of the Retro-timeship in the astrodome... all the while thinking this woman had her share of charm and he would not have to be asked twice to take her in his arms.

  Interrupting his private thoughts here he turned back, instinctively, to peek at Glanya.

  She had stopped examining the machines on board. Having expected to be gazed at by the young engineer she looked deep into his eyes. Shaking her head slowly, pretending to be stern, she whispered a reproach.

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk...” Then in thought language she added, “You’re a real lecher, Kurt.”

  The Austrian turned red on being caught thinking so freely and did not know what to do in his confusion. He coughed, leaned casually against the transparent cockpit and, forcing a smile, he concentrated on the countryside.

  When Commander Taylor feinted a maneuver before landing, he shouted, “Good God! They’re going to think we’re attacking.”

  Indeed, a troop of giant Bimkamians came running out. Armed with a kind of machine gun with a long barrel, they encircled the Retro-timeship and pointed their weapons at the hatches.

  At the head of the troop our friends recognized three of the people from the control room who had spoken with the young blonde on the viewer. They must have detected the approaching ship, which the explorers had forgotten to cloak, and were approaching it ready for any eventuality.