by Brian Ball
“Have patience, Captain,” said Hawk. “We won’t fear for long.”
Mindless matter rushed to the frail human barrier.
Spingarn found that he could hold the weapon without trembling. Ethel had waved to him, and he could face the enemy now.
He waved back as the indescribably malevolent mass poured glistening and foul down the cliff-face.
“Now!” he bawled to Ethel.
Behind him, he heard four slight coughs from within Horace’s body. Needle darts of light hovered.
The cliff-face blossomed into fury.
26
Sergeant Hawk himself let out a single but utterly sincere expletive:
“God’s bloody boots!”
The wave bombs began their weird, particle-jangling series of implosions. Cold gray matter spun round and round, describing a whirlpool of concentric circles, each one smaller than the last, and then vanished in a tiny red flowering of light; jagged heads swam out of the serried shocks. Wide, alien mouths gibbered rage and terror as the successive waves of shocks ate into the wall of gray gelatinous matter which had at one time seemed to be no more substantial than morning mist, and which now had the appearance of flowing metal. The ghosts—the strange admixture of extra-Universal matter and human brain—flung out a combined message of hatred that shook the ranks of semihumans; it built into a grim and eternal threat, a clear, stark message of the end of human life and the triumph of the enemy. And the frightful warning had some effect.
A pair of wolf-headed humans put back their heads and bayed in stark terror at the thunderous storm; all the horses which had drawn the heavy carts and which were now unharnessed, took in the import of the ghosts’ call and broke into a gallop toward the vast shimmering structure of the Crystalline Worlds fragment; a young thyroid giant began to scream while two dwarfs took to their wings and fled to the jeers of their fellows. Sergeant Hawk began to shout with joy.
“Huzzah!” he bawled. “Huzzah! Give fire! Present your fusils and give fire!”
Even the immense uproar of the howling gale and the ferocious screams of the ghosts could not drown Hawk’s bellows; from leathery lungs, his commands rang out with a sharp clarity that instantly affected the assembled bands. As the amorphous blobs of metallic jelly spurted with the shock of the wave bombs, the air was filled with flying missiles. Arrows arced fleetingly through the rain; their explosive heads burst snappingly among the alien mess. Cannon roared sullenly as the contingent of Primitives discharged their pieces; Hawk and Spingarn added the uncanny glow of their phaser beams to the colossal assault, while from the strange splinter of the Crystalline Worlds came two or three slow gobbets of incandescence which rolled with the majesty of sunrise toward the enemy.
“Huzzah! Huzzah and be damned to you! Back to your master, Satan!” yelled Hawk. “What a piece this is, Captain!”
The cliff-face vanished into a welter of molten rock and dissolving alien matter, taking the bulk of that astonishing amalgam of terrifying things with it. But a sharp death-call told the jubilant semihumans that the enemy was still among them! Hawk bellowed his orders.
“They’re in our right flank! Face them!” he bawled. “Form line and face them! Give fire from the center! Advance the red monkey and use the Greek Fire!”
“Horace!” called Spingarn, and the robot waved a skeletal arm in acknowledgment. It had understood Hawk’s confused but urgent instructions. The launching platform moved and Spingarn roared to Ethel.
They were too late to save a tribe of squat toadlike semihumans which had tried to hold back the flanking assault with a combination of tridents and sponges soaked in some liquid which smoked and reeked of powerful acids; though portions of the jibbering things dissolved into shrieking fragments, the tribe was overrun. The ghosts revealed gruesome fangs, and it was their insatiable appetite for their life-giving food taken from the depths of the human skull that gave the defenders a chance to reform; as the frightful alien creatures snapped through bone and into the heavy skulls of the toadmen, Ethel directed a fresh cargo of wave bombs into the carnage. Again the eerie scene was disturbed by the fury of the shock waves; the gobbets of inhuman jelly tried to escape, but the waves held them. Circles of fire pursued them, billowing and snaking them into deadly pools of particle-stripping fury; and Spingarn saw that the lesser armament was brought into play. Here and there a zittering piece of alien burst into fragments as the dwarfs’ arrows took it cleanly; the brass mouths of the cannon belched their own sullen accompaniment, flinging heavy iron balls at stray groups of jelly.
“Huzzah!” bawled Hawk again, taking a still-resolute wraith into oblivion with the powerful weapon in his hands. “Work for the Pioneers, by god, Spingarn! Fire away, Captain!”
“Carry on, Sergeant! Finish them off!”
And then Spingarn motioned the robot to his side.
There was one last task to perform.
While the assembled tribes moved in to eradicate the last trace of the fearful enemy, burning every last fragment of the long-dreaded ghosts’ presence with fire, Spingarn scrambled around corpses, rocks, jungle detritus, pools of molten metal, over unlikely weapons and dying semihumans, through strange growths which were the outlying markers of the fragmented Frames, and among a whole grove of fetishes brought by some unknown band of tribesmen; the Alien had made conditions.
He showed Horace where to place the last flight of wave bombs so that they would take out every sign that the silently moving Genekey had ever existed. And, as the groups of semihumans began to shout their astonishment at the strangeness of their fellow inhabitants of the Frames of Talisker, the wave bombs began their eerie dance about the Genekey.
Grim waves of fury boiled with appalling violence.
The living radiance of the Genekey writhed.
It squirmed in the grip of the particle-wrenching upheaval of force, gradually losing shape and becoming one with the undulations of the implosions about it.
The triumphant and noisy tribes were still, suddenly aware of this new happening. Gargantuan mouths opened wide in protest; shrill screams echoed from the dwarfs, who had taken to the air in a victory roll; semihumans of all kinds watched in silent horror as the Genekey became a random collection of particles. From the strange fragment that was a reenactment of life in the Crystalline Worlds came a blaze of passionate starlight: it described patterns of rage and regret, outlining to the watching tribesmen its own surge of grief and loss.
“Aye,” said Hawk, as the grief-stricken watchers searched for the cause of the disaster. “We’d best be moving, Captain?”
“It would seem the moment for a strategic withdrawal,” agreed the robot.
Sharp eyes pierced the blackening rainstorm. As a final crash of thunder echoed and reechoed around the battleground, one of the thyroid giants recognized Spingarn. The giant pointed, speechless. And then a sheet of lightning flashed down into the strange arena, illuminating the robot, still with his red fur shimmering brightly; Sergeant Hawk, ragged and indomitable as he moved to a natural shelter in the broken ground; Ethel, her long hair gleaming with rain and her translucent wings swimming, it seemed, through the rain; and Spingarn, who stared back at the tribesmen and wondered if the final demand which the Alien had put upon him could be satisfied.
“No,” said Spingarn, as Horace prepared to hoist the two men out of danger. “We stay.”
Mouths which had been stopped by exhaustion or shock began to give voice. The assembled tribes of near-humanity shrieked and raved their enormous rage. The battleground, still shuddering under the continuing dispersal of the effects of the wave bombs and the end of the Genekey, was filled with a bitter anger. The dream which had sustained the inhabitants of the planet had been smashed—deliberately and coldly smashed.
The only way back to a dimly felt but prized normalcy had been stopped by the three insignificant figures who now waited, frozen into immobility by the utter savagery of the sound of raging disappointment.
“Stay, Capta
in? Stay here! Look, they’re turning on us—we’ll be annihilated!”
“I hope not, Sergeant,” said Spingarn. His voice was dry. “Ethel!” he called.
She dropped out of the storm and into his arms.
“Is this the end?”
“Not if the Alien can be trusted.”
There had to be trust, he thought. Out in that emptiness where the Alien had set out its hopes and fears, they had made a pact. He was to ensure that the ghosts would be destroyed; the Alien would reveal the location of the Genekey. So much had been done. There was more, of course, much more. But that depended upon the Alien’s sense of honor. Spingarn caught himself choking down a burst of laughter: honor! He was thinking, of the Alien as a human, attributing to it the morals arrived at during ten thousand years of civilization on a planet at the edges of the Galaxy. No! It would not be a sense of honor, or trust, that would save them, if they were to be saved. Self-interest alone would compel the Alien to carry out its side of the bargain.
Hawk sighted along the slim length of the phaser.
“Time-Out!” shouted Spingarn. “Time-Out!”
The tribesmen acted on this first show of what appeared to be defiance. With a frightening display of unanimity, they advanced toward the four. As they moved, they dropped the weapons which they had used against the ghosts. Axes, slings, muskets, lances, thermic guns, arbalests, odd-looking contrivances of steel and leather which Hawk had been curious about: all were discarded. Spingarn found himself clutching the phaser beamer tightly. The monsters that had been men wanted blood on their hands. And in their teeth and claws, in spidery limbs and hooked appendages. The blood of the destroyers of the Genekey. Spingarn called aloud, despairing:
“Time-Out!”
The other three called out too, incoherent shouts for anything that would remove them from this dreadful menacing approach.
Again Spingarn called.
“Time-Out!!!!”
The words splayed across a gaping pit around him.
The night of cold emptiness was here.
He knew nothing, felt nothing, was unaware, of the flashing voyage back to Frames Control.
Time passed, but Spingarn and the others were outside it.
27
Again Spingarn waited in the anteroom. The same smiling wraith of a man regarded him with an indulgent air. Sergeant Hawk was drinking in the peepshow of the mind beamers, chuckling to himself as he recognized this or that historical reenactment. He had become accustomed gradually to the notion that he was no longer a Sergeant of Pioneers, but the mannerisms and attitudes of the eighteenth century would be his forever. No amount of conditioning, declared the comps, could eradicate that powerful persona from his mind; with some psyches, you had to give up. Ethel, like the other two humans, had not responded to the comps’ suggestive treatment of their physical deformities. She was hovering abstractedly above the thin aide, while he pretended that he daily received callers on wings. Horace was still in a state of robotic shock after the tension of the final encounter with the Alien, though he had been passed fit for light duties. It was Spingarn who was afraid. The others had looked away as he trembled when the aide announced that the Director of the Frames would see them almost immediately. He was recalling that earlier meeting with the coiled thing in the thick yellow mud. Apart from the weird results of his intervention on the planet which housed the now-dismembered Frames of Talisker, how could he face that snake’s head with the information that he had destroyed the Genekey?
“God’s bloody boots!” called Hawk to Ethel. “Look, my dear—there’s a Frame of the ancient Romans! See the ranks of them charging the Persians! A very moving crocodile, they are! And you say I could go into this play?” he said to the aide.
“Hardly, sir. Not with that encumbrance on your legs. It wouldn’t fit in now, would it? We don’t call them plays, by the way, sir.”
“Sergeant!” Hawk snapped. “Aye. I’d forgotten my legs. Now, monkey,” he said to Horace, “can you do anything for me?”
The thin man smiled superciliously. “Like the Director, sir, you’re one of those unfortunates who’ll have to live with some slight alterations to the normal type of physique.” He took a swift look at Ethel’s elegant shape and at Spingarn’s coiled tail. “I wonder what the Director’s going to make of this!”
Horace repeated what they all knew; the mysteries of the Genekey had vanished in that series of eerie waves of force. Comp was working on the random despecialized cells, yes, but the math of the thing was beyond them. Without actually saying it, they had referred Spingarn’s party back to the Alien for treatment. Horace was inclined to be dispirited now that he had been interviewed, if that is the expression for it, by the somber automatons who had attended Spingarn’s departure for the Frames of Talisker; he had been subjected to a ripping process of analysis which had left him trembling in a state of electronic epilepsy. It was a feeling that had affected the human members of the party; Sergeant Hawk, naturally an ebullient man, had been the first to regain his normal composure, and Ethel had followed. As Hawk murmured encouragement to the figures who reeled in the smoke of Battle in a slice of a reenactment of an antique war, Ethel flitted from one batch of mind beamers to another. It was obvious to Spingarn, from the way she lingered before a tranquil and pastoral twenty-third century Frame, that she had taken his proposal of marriage seriously. When, in utter relief at having survived the terrors of Talisker, he had suggested that they mate and marry, she had been skeptical. She pointed out that their union might well be objected to by the Breeding Selection Directory, if only on the grounds of their aberrant physiques. A physical assault had convinced her that she was wrong.
Spingarn wondered if they would be able to live relatively normal lives in the world of the twenty-ninth century. As Ethel swept across at the insistence of a mind beamer which had tuned itself to her erotic thoughts, he found himself looking uneasily over his shoulder as if the calm anteroom were full of submerged dangers. It had all been too easy.
“So they’re Frames, my little man, are they?” Hawk said to the aide. “Speak up, dammit!”
“Yes, sir, they’re called Frames. Frames,” the wraith of a man repeated. “Reenacted scenes from the whole range of human history.”
Hawk absorbed the information and continued his inspection of the battle he was watching; he grunted critically as a regiment of horsemen swept up a steep escarpment which had been mined. The tiny horizon blossomed. Hawk spat approvingly and was only restrained from cheering by Spingarn’s surly glare.
“Now, Captain!” Hawk bawled. “What ails you! We’re out of the realms of His Satanic Majesty, and we’re to meet your General! Dammit, Spingarn, Ethel’s sweating for you—never seen a wench so taken with a man! The future’s yours, Captain, though I mustn’t call you that now, I suppose. What will you do with yourself now you’re back in your own day and age?” Hawk peered at the clearing battle scene. “Rummy sort of day, if you ask me. Odd sort of age.”
Spingarn spoke to Horace rather than to Sergeant Hawk.
“It was all too easy!”
For the past three or four hours—ever since they had been flung from the planet at the edge of the Galaxy and through the wild interstices of time and space in one of the huge starships—he had been as acutely puzzled as when he had emerged from the underground caverns of Tournai; there was the same sense of unreality. Then, it had been justified, for the Frames were only a shadow of a shell of reality, though the soldiers who fought and died in the red soil of that new Tournai believed in it. But that early feeling of disconnectedness had cleared. It had given way to the realization that he, Private Spingarn, was ex-Private Spingarn; and that he had been a man on the run from those frightful Frames of Talisker. And here he was, Spingarn who had recovered enough of his identity to travel to the planet; Spingarn who had been there, encountered the Alien and, finally, made a bargain with it. Terms had been agreed. Contracts exchanged.
On both sides, the agreement
had been fulfilled.
Here he was, back in the twenty-ninth century.
There was the Alien, oriented to a sufficient degree to begin the task of returning to its own Universe.
No more could be asked on either side.
“Too easy, Captain? I wouldn’t have called it easy.” Hawk eyed his Captain with some alarm. “You always were a hard soldier, Captain. What they called a rough man. Even so, I don’t think you’d be right in calling the last bit of bother easy, sir!”
Horace stirred.
“I’ve no contribution to make, sir,” it told Spingarn in a wheeze of self-pitying static. “I know what you mean, sir, but I’ve been through so much that my faculties are permanently impaired. I doubt if I’m up to Umpiring, sir. I think I’ll ask for a transfer to domestic duties. Could you use a willing valet, sir?”
The aide interrupted:
“If you don’t mind, my happy wanderers? Good. The Director will see you now. And you, madame. If you could get down. Please?”
Spingarn was prepared for the sight of the transmogrified Frames Director; he had explained to the others the horrific nature of the thing in the yellow mud. Even so, he asked the smirking aide whether the safety precautions were in operation.
“Oh, yes! We can’t let the Director loose on the customers, can we!”
The others watched apprehensively as the doors slid open. The same hot fetid stench assailed them. Spingarn felt Ethel’s shudder under his hand. Horace let out a dismal groan as the blackness cleared and the vast chamber began to glow with light.
Hawk muttered imprecations as movements could be made out: slithery, slapping noises came to them. Wet, clinging sounds; coiling slow motions.
Something began to giggle.
“No,” whispered Ethel. Spingarn held her more closely; her heart pounded under his rough hand. “It can’t be! Not here—we left things like this on Talisker!”