by Brian Ball
“Horace!” groaned Spingarn. “Horace, you useless bastard—where are you!”
“The Frame-Shift factor!” called the girl. “How do we change it!”
“Go, lad!” said Hawk again. He was calmly snipping a fuse into shape. “Drink and go, Spingarn—leave the monsters to me!” he regarded his fire-scarred iron base and the jagged metal onto which it had been fused. “A sad end, to be a living trunnion, lad! But no matter! Ah, no, miss, d’you see, it’s too heavy!”
He had turned upward to see Ethel, who was frantically hauling at his shoulders, wings rhythmically lashing the air. But she could not move the fused man. Spingarn watched her, hoping for seconds that she would be able to pit her frail elegance against the squat bulk of the meteorite; but it had taken two of the monsters to carry the fetish to the place of sacrifice, and no amount of straining on either his part or Ethel’s would move it. There were a couple of minutes left. Two minutes or so in which to devise a way of saving the Sergeant of Pioneers from the gruesome scrutiny of the maniacal giants!
Hawk was trembling, but his hands held the grenade firmly. He glanced at Spingarn and grinned. Though Hawk was struggling with the overlaid persona of a Primitive, he was alert and happy.
“You’ve no choice, Captain!” he said. “God’s boots, move!”
“No!” shrieked Ethel. “Look!”
Frame-Shift occurred.
The Frames of Talisker passed through the uncanny redistribution of physical events that the giants had waited so patiently for. The whole planetary crust wrinkled and cracked as immense engines chopped the ancient Frames into new patterns. The light of an old sun began to creep into the amphitheater. From the icecaps of the mountains glinted a rose-red burst of glory.
Frame-Shift!
The monumental barrier that lay under the chain of mountains shook itself and heaved aside the strata above. Spingarn had eyes only for the incredible majesty of the manipulation of the Frames—he drank in the stupendous sight of glaciers suddenly rearing themselves up like drunken beasts, of precipices shattering and smashing themselves into shale, of the needle tips of mountains throwing red morning sunlight a thousand miles away as they toppled and fell!
Then Spingarn realized that it was not the vast physical reshaping of the Frames that Ethel was pointing out.
Now it was Hawk’s turn to gape in awe:
“Gawd!”
There was too much happening. As a new creation ripped mountains and valleys into fragments, and as the giants began to jerk epileptically as they emerged from the sense-blinding molecular-dispersal field that held them, the morning sun illuminated a new and utterly strange sight.
“Balloons!” Ethel said, seeing a way of escape. “Spingarn—there’s a flotilla of balloons coming here!”
Eerily silent, unmanned and like vast multicolored wraiths, the balloons swayed downward, brought on a faint but steady wind.
Spingarn clutched at what was left of his ability to adapt to new circumstances. Hot-air balloons?
“Frenchies!” snarled Hawk.
He raised a grenade.
Spingarn leaped to stop him.
18
“No!” roared Spingarn, his voice booming among the heaped bones and the groaning giants. “No, Hawk! Don’t grenade them! We can use them, man!”
Ethel was fluttering down to Spingarn, shaking him and babbling in fright and incredulity:
“They’re empty—it must be a part of the Frame-Shift Factor! The Disaster Control agent said it would be random—anything could happen! It’s a new Plot! We could use them to get over the barrier! But the giants!”
Spingarn had convinced Hawk by this time; the old Sergeant of Pioneers still had the glazed look of half-madness that came over him before he destroyed his enemies in a tower of mud and red flame. But he was obedient to Spingarn’s orders, and the grenade’s fuse was doused.
The vast argosies sailed closer, revealing intricate webbing for retaining the enormous silken bags that held the hot air; Spingarn could see every last detail of the bright geometrical patterns on the nearest balloon; he could see too the wooden gondola slung below, a capacious painted basket. With half his mind he was busy calculating the math of the fields necessary to bring about the physical manipulations to the planetary surface: he ran through lightning calculations of the forces necessary to disperse in a few morning seconds the accretions of eons of layered strata. And without knowing why, he was sure it was terribly wrong! Once more the Frames of Talisker had produced that terrible stench of an Alien presence, for no human had installed machines of such dimensions!
But the practical half of Spingarn’s mind was already working on a plan to use the balloons.
A giant at the edge of the short-lived field began to scratch at his dank beard.
“Spingarn!” screamed Ethel, when she saw it. “They’ll kill us!”
“There’s that, lad,” said Hawk.
Spingarn saw that he had lost a few precious seconds.
“Can you bring it down?” he asked Ethel.
The nearest balloon was still, bobbing gently in a fixed position a dozen or two feet above them. It might as well have been on the far side of the planet. Ethel! If they could release some air, bring it down, then they might escape!
Ethel launched herself into the crisp air on wings of gossamer. She rose smoothly and with a powerful elegance that made her seem instantly desirable to Spingarn. Hawk began to raise a Huzzah! as she climbed into the gaudy wooden gondola, but Spingarn’s intent face stopped him.
If they could bring it down!
“What shall I do, Spingarn?” called the girl. Her slight weight caused the large gondola to tilt slightly, but the ponderous air-filled silken balloon above came no nearer to the ground; it swayed obstinately steady about forty feet above the amphitheater.
“They’re coming!” screamed Ethel.
But Spingarn had already sensed that the field had all but exhausted itself. The monsters were shaking puzzled heads and freeing their limbs from beneath the bodies of their fellows. They were cold, stiff, and astonished to find themselves on the ground; it was only slowly that they took in the presence of the armada of brightly-painted balloons. And still they scratched at themselves and grunted at one another.
“Release some air!” yelled Spingarn, and, mercifully, Ethel was quick to free the knobs that controlled the flow of hot air into the billowing canopy. The balloon dropped abruptly, the wooden gondola almost on top of the fused Sergeant of Pioneers. Ethel fell onto Spingarn, and it was only Hawk’s presence of mind in seizing hold of the brass rail which ran around the edge of the gondola that prevented the balloon from billowing away from them in a slight wind. The giants watched Hawk’s sinewy frame creak with the effort of holding down the airship. Their minds were clearing, and they knew now that they had missed the first beginnings of a new Frame of existence; they began to know who was their enemy.
“The giants,” said Ethel. “Quick, Spingarn!”
He disentangled himself from her and leaped to Hawk’s aid. But it was Ethel’s nimble fingers that found the opening in the side of the gondola, and it was her silent urging that coordinated the efforts of the three of them in half-pushing, half-heaving the heavy meteorite into the cage of the gondola. The giants clawed at the cobwebs in their brains; they lumbered to their feet and looked for a lead from anyone whose mind was in tune with this latest turn of events. Then a shambling mountain of brawn investigated the wickerwork cages; another pointed stupidly to the billowing armada in the amphitheater; still another began to roar out a question at the sight of Hawk’s painful movements as the Sergeant of Pioneers was manhandled into the gondola.
“Baaa—l—oooo—aaa—dd?” one roared.
The awful roaring began again, but there was still no rush to seize the escaping trio. Spingarn had hoped that the field which had momentarily distorted the electromagnetic impulses of their brains might have this kind of stupefying after-effect; but this period of helples
s inability to grasp the situation which the giants were exhibiting was more than he had dared to consider. If only the antique vessel could be persuaded to take to the air!
“I can’t do it!” Ethel sobbed. “I don’t know how it works!”
Spingarn leaped into the gondola while Ethel wrenched at brass levers. Smoke issued in a black cloud from a primitive heat engine. Carboniferous vapors vomited from the gleaming iron stove. But how to manipulate the levers! How to increase the heat of the air in the canopy now sagging above them! And for how long would the giants stare in rapt awe at the fleet of balloons!
“Stand aside, Captain Devil!” commanded Hawk. “These contraptions are meat and drink for the Pioneers! Why, the Great Duke himself saw an exhibition when one of those Frog monkeys made the very spit of this engine! Here, my Captain, throw this at the monsters—” He snorted and passed Spingarn the grenade which he had been nursing. “—and be ready, miss, the balloon’s about to go up!”
The giants realized the purpose of what they were seeing just as the engine coughed into active life; Hawk bent to open a wide flue in the bottom of the furnace. Air roared into the dying coals. At once, the black clouds turned gray, then almost white, and the silk of the vast geometrically patterned canopy began to inflate.
“Grenade them, Spingarn—give them a taste of Woolwich powder, lad!”
Spingarn took the bomb. He waited until the short length of fuse on the grenade began to splutter and fizz; then he yelled to the girl to take cover. The giants were moving in a solid phalanx of frightfulness toward the airship. The black round grenade spun three times in the crisp morning air. The nearer giants, recalling the eerie time-distorting molecular-dispersal bomb of the night before, pushed back, halting momentarily. Then the grenade bounced toward them, just as the ropes of the airship began to creak with the strain of Hawk and the meteorite to which he was bonded.
“Away we go, lad!” Sergeant Hawk roared. “Huzzah! Huzzah! Confound the enemies of Good Queen Anne! Huzzah!”
The blast of the grenade exploding concussed the three balloonists. It flung the airship a score of feet above the ground. Fragments of metal whistled past them, though none hit the envelope of gas. One chunk of metal clanged into the meteorite, causing Hawk to bellow again. To the shrieks and howls of the giants, the airship swam slowly upward, the gondola rocking from side to side unbalanced by the mass of the iron fetish.
Spingarn was stunned still, but he could see that he was out of the dream of pain. What he saw was not a hallucination.
Horace was back.
The furred robot was negligently regarding him, its head peering over the side of the gondola. It clung to the brass rail with one hand, its humanoid limbs dangling down.
“Good morning, sir!”
“Gawd!” said Spingarn. “Where were you!”
Ethel looked too. She was talking, not realizing that they had all been deafened by the grenade blast.
Spingarn could make out that she was as surprised to see Horace as he was. Then Hawk began to join in the pantomime. All three of them spoke to one another, and none of them heard a word.
“I heard you,” said Spingarn. “Not the others.”
“Er—sort of ultrasonics, sir. Don’t worry. You’ll all recover soon.”
“Then where were you when we needed you!” snarled Spingarn. “You—you useless bag of electronics—you red monkey! Why didn’t you come along when we were about to be gutted by the giants!”
“Oh, no, sir! Not in the rules—the contract, sir. The arrangements, sir. Not until you altered the probabilities of the situation, sir.”
“What do you mean—we altered them by escaping?”
“No, sir.”
“By taking the balloon?”
Spingarn watched the humanoid’s features. The robot was enjoying the situation. There was admiration too on its face.
“Not that either, sir, though it’s entirely in character, sir! How well you all worked—what an admirable choice to bring the young lady and your splendid Sergeant!”
Spingarn knew again the familiar feeling of frustrated rage at the vacuity of the robot; it could no more talk in a straightforward way then the airship could be persuaded to fly a predetermined course. Horace had the worst features of its kind—an egocentric pedanticism, a schoolmasterly fondness for the roundabout phrasing, a refusal to be brief and to the point.
“You tell me now,” grated Spingarn. “You tell me now. Now! Or I’ll have you recalled as defective!”
“Very well, sir! Immediately, sir! Don’t do that, sir! It’s the meteorite, sir!” Hawk mouthed vivid obscenities about the iron mass. “You took the thunder stone, sir! Now the giants have to follow!”
Spingarn shook his head. He was beginning to hear again.
He thought over what the robot had told him, then he realized that the girl was shouting at the top of her voice; he could just begin to make out what she called.
“Spingarn—the giants—balloons—they’re coming!”
He looked below.
Red, yellow, green, blue, black, orange, flowered and tasseled, ornamented with brassware, a whole fleet of air-born argosies dipped and swayed under the bulk of the giants. Smoke gushed from furnaces. The enormous canopies swelled and billowed. Rope groaned with the effort of supporting the packed gondolas. Below the ground was littered with the dying and the dead.
The giants knew they were finished with one Frame, and that Frame-Shift beckoned them to another series of reenactments.
Spingarn shook the robot.
“Well, what does it mean!”
“A new Frame, sir. A battle,” the robot went on. “This Frame calls for a reenactment of a Seventh Asiatic Confederation skirmish—not really a battle, I suppose, sir. More of a skirmish.”
19
“Seventh Asiatic Confederation!”
Spingarn found himself choking down a burst of zany laughter. “Seventh Asiatic Confederation! A reenactment of a what!”
“A battle, sir. A deep-space encounter between one ship and a detachment of cruisers.”
“We’re going to reenact a battle!” groaned Spingarn.
“Huzzah!” bawled Hawk. “Pioneers ready, sir!”
“Not—?” said Spingarn helplessly.
He could not credit the truth of what the robot was trying to point out. Horace helped:
“Captain Spingarn, sir, this is a random series of Frames now. You’ve altered the probabilities by taking the thunder stone.”
“And that’s why we’re going to have a battle?”
Horace considered the question carefully.
“Well, yes, sir. And no.”
“Shall I look to the arms, sir?” Hawk put in. He glowed with delight as he surveyed the familiar fusils, the little cask of powder, the array of implements for charging and priming the weapons, and, best of all, a net of cylindrical black shapes. Grenades.
Hawk trembled like an old war horse at the sound of trumpets.
“Do that!” exclaimed Spingarn. “You do that, Sergeant!”
“We’re going to have a battle Plot?” Ethel said.
She had been listening to the exchange, and she was as puzzled as Spingarn.
“But the Seventh Asiatic Confederation used sunguns—they had warp-shift destroyers! Molecular bombs! And where are—”
She stopped, and both she and Spingarn choked down laughter.
“Yes and no?” Spingarn said to the robot.
“Yes, we’ll have a battle,” said Horace. “No, the reason for it isn’t that you changed the probabilities. It was already in the Frame-Shift sequences, sir.”
“Now you lose me,” Spingarn said.
“It isn’t simple,” the robot agreed.
“But we do battle?”
“We reenact, sir.”
“Not with the balloons!” giggled Ethel. “Not with the balloons!”
She began to laugh, and, in his exhausted condition, Spingarn found her hysteria infectious. To his ho
rror he heard falsetto noises coming from his own throat. Hawk stared at them in astonishment.
The robot waited politely. At last it said, “Yes, sir. With balloons.”
“We’d best look to the arms, then. Here, monkey,” he said to the robot. “Can you use your mountebanks’ wiles on this?”
Horace shied away from the question, but Hawk insisted.
“You cursed monkey—I addressed myself to you! Now, you French bastard, can you free me of me pedestal?”
“Can you?” asked Spingarn, who had accepted the new situation.
“Well, no, sir.”
“It’s against your instructions,” said Spingarn. “Isn’t it?”
“Well, sir, it affects the uncertainties too much. You see, sir, it isn’t just a meteorite.”
“Fusils!” roared Hawk.
He had listened to the exchange between Spingarn and Horace, but his was a practical mind. Though he was troubled by the inconvenience of the mound of metal fused to his iron base, he could take in the demands of the situation at the same time. And he had seen that the gondola was equipped as an offensive craft.
“Dammit, Spingarn, we’re in danger from the monsters—see we’ve half a dozen fusils here—and balls and powder!”
Spingarn glared from the robot to Hawk’s excited face. Then he looked again at the mass of scarred iron that kept the gondola swaying slightly in the freshening wind.
“Then if it’s more than a meteorite, what is it!”
“You should load the fusils, sir. And I don’t know.”
Spingarn reached for the familiar but almost forgotten weapon which Ethel was proffering. He found that the skill had not left his hands, for he broke the tube of powder and spat the ball into the wide aperture with no thought and with complete accuracy. More than a meteorite. He regarded the robot intently. Then he remembered that Horace would bend his own rules, given sufficient incentive:
“You’re holding out on me, Horace,” he said. Far below the terrain was quite different from what it had seemed only twelve hours before. Gone were the mighty promontories. Now, there was a vast and endless desert, a great plain of sand.