Prisoner of Time

by Perry Rhodan

  Rous raised his hand. "Have you gone crazy?"

  "If we don't want to lose our Normal Time, we've got to try it, Lieutenant!" Noir yelled at him without respect for rank. "Should we fall into the other dimension and lose our Normal Time? Then we'd never get back!"

  Rous understood what Noir meant.

  But Ragov understood even more quickly.

  He leaped forward, crying from pain while his lost arm became visible again, and sprang into the middle of the glowing circle of the time window.

  At the same time, he disappeared completely.

  Rous felt himself grasped and shoved through the ring of fire. His eyes noticed the change even as his head crossed the boundary into the other dimension. Not that it was lighter or darker... no, not at all. The light stayed the same. But the landscape had changed. It was as though passage through the time window had been a teleportation leap at the same time and he had landed on another world. Or was it Tats-Tor in a different time?

  He saw Ragov, who had come to rest two or three meters away, having not landed on his feet. The Russian was just then standing up, looking around in surprise and not quite understanding everything yet. But-what had they really expected?

  Rous suddenly felt a push from nowhere and lost his balance. Luckily, he did not fall and managed to regain his footing. He turned and saw Harras floating three meters above the ground and encircled by a faintly glowing ring.

  "Jump!" Rous cried.

  Harras jumped and landed next to Rous. "Good heavens-where are we?"

  Rous waited until all the men had collected beside him and only the weakly shining ring showed the way back into their own time plane. Once it was lost to view, there could be no return.

  "We're on the world of the Unseen, Harras," Rous said. "Nothing moves besides us here, not even the wind, because everything exists at a rate 72000 times more slowly than us. We are invisible to any inhabitants of this world because we move too fast."

  "Where are the inhabitants?" asked Josua fearfully, staying close to Steiner.

  "We'll find them," Rous promised vaguely and, pointed in the direction of a nearby hill. "Look at the Arkonide police troop, Noir. They've lost their Normal Time and exist now in an alien time. Don't those men look like lumps of stone?"

  They looked around and were silent although they all were burning with questions. They assumed somehow that Rous would answer them all, for he had once been in the other time plane for awhile.

  The horizon was cut off by a darkly shining wall reaching high into the sky. It marked the limits of the LFG's effective radius. The men could not penetrate beyond the black wall and what lay behind would remain a mystery.

  They stood on a fertile plain which was broken by valleys and hills. Streams and brooks rolled on through the valleys towards an unknown destination beyond the black wall. Starkly motionless stood the trees in front of the men, unmoved by even a breath of wind. It was relatively warm and humid. Some clouds in the sky indicated that rain would not be long in coming.

  An odd flickering in the air led Harras to a question. "It isn't really so warm that the heated air should be rising. And anyway-if your theory's correct, Lieutenant-any movement of the air would be so slow that we wouldn't notice it. Do you have an explanation?"

  Rous looked toward the horizon and also noticed the flickering. He narrowed his eyes and nodded slowly. "Yes, I have an explanation. You will also have an explanation for all the phenomena you encounter if you never forget that everything here lives and exists more slowly. The flickering you see, Harras, comes from air molecules breaking up the light."

  Steiner moaned lightly and took his eyes away from the astounding view. Then his glance fell upon a transparent and shining crystal about the size of a pea, hanging motionless in the air. All but frightened, the physicist pointed at it and stammered in bewilderment: "The explanation, Rous? Here's a crystal object floating weightless in the air. Does gravity also have something to do with the retardation of time?"

  Rous looked at the crystal and smiled in relief. "Mr. Steiner, I already said, that there would be an explanation for everything. That includes this crystal, which is nothing other than a very slowly falling raindrop. Consider that this raindrop falls 72,000 times more slowly than on Earth, assuming this world has the same gravitation, which seems to be the case. What does that mean? The raindrop falls about 10 centimeters an hour, based on the usual speed of falling back on Terra."

  They stared at the wonder of the floating crystal, which seemed to defy all understanding. Steiner was evidently not completely convinced. He reached out to the raindrop with his hand and tried to grasp it.

  But he did not succeed. The crystal hung in the air as though nailed there and could not be moved a millimeter. The inertia of its mass had increased parallel to the retardation of time. One required 72,000 times more energy to catch a raindrop here than on the Earth. Not even Steiner had that much strength.

  "You can't grasp it!" he decided and gave up. "At least we won't get wet here."

  Rous turned, looking for the ring of light. He breathed easier when he saw it. "I think we'll take a little walk over to the black wall. Maybe we can find out what's on the other side. Careful, Ragov, don't trip over our police officer."

  The Russian stopped and looked at the Arkonide with an indefinable expression. The officer stood unmoving and apparently lifeless before him. His eyes were half opened and it was impossible to tell if they were opening or shutting. In any event, it could be another eight to 10 hours before he had completed the motion. Roughly speaking, a single second was about 20 hours.

  Ragov touched the tip of his index finger to the Arkonide's cheek. It felt like stone and was just as cold. Half an hour would go by before the warmth of the living body penetrated to Ragov's nerves.

  The staring face showed neither fear nor pain. There had not been enough time. With a sinking feeling Ragov suddenly realized that the Arkonide might realize what had happened to him only in another 50 hours. At the moment, however, he stood ripped out of his own world, a thousandth of a second incarnate.

  "He can't see us," said Rous nodding to Ragov. "We're too fast for him. If he wanted to see us in his new world, he would have to film us with a camera that takes more than a million pictures a second. We are considerably faster for him than a bullet."

  "What if we want to see how he moves?" asked Harras.

  After considering for a few seconds, Rous went on. "Very simple, Harras. We'd have to photograph this monument with a time-lapse camera-16 exposures in 20 hours. When the film is played at normal speed, 16 frames a second, then we'd see the Arkonide as he really is."

  Steiner pointed to the officer's half-opened mouth. "Is it the same for acoustic effects?"

  "Of course!" Rous understood immediately what the physicist was getting at. "The sound waves have also been slowed down relative to us. Assuming that the same natural laws are in effect here as on Earth, then sound moves at a speed of about 17 meters an hour. Not the sound waves we produce-those are governed by different laws. The speed of sound is five millimeters for us in this dimension, then. Perhaps now you understand just how fast we're moving."

  "Are we breaking the sound barrier?" said Harras, always the practical sort. His face contorted into a questioning grimace as he started to move and felt the gentle, flowing resistance of the air, which seemed to move to the side only reluctantly.

  They gradually approached the black wall. The wall closed off a circular area about 232 kilometers in diameter. In the exact center the time window shone faintly yet clearly.

  Rous found time to look up into the sky. The cloud formation had not changed in the slightest and days would go by before the already falling raindrops reached the surface of this uncanny planet. Earthly days, of course. How long a local day would last in this timelessness defied calculation. If the world revolved once on its axis in 24 Terran hours, then the sun would stand in the sky for about 100 years. A century would pass before the sun would rise fro
m the east and cross the sky to sink in the west.

  A day would last for 200 years!

  Rous' brain reeled as he thought about it. No wonder an eye blink would take 20 hours to perform.

  The sky was colored a light reddish with a pale greenish undertone. The sun was hidden behind the clouds and under the circumstances could take years to reappear.

  Rous suddenly understood.

  Before he could tell the others of his new calculation, they stood before a new discovery.

  A wide stream separated them from the black wall slicing across the landscape a few hundred meters ahead.

  Stream...?

  The stream, tossed by the intangible storm, was frozen in the midst of its movement, but one could plainly see the direction of the wind. The stream looked as though it had been suddenly petrified. Some of the spray hung motionless like shining crystals in the air. It could take hours for the crystals to fall back into the water.

  "How are we going to get over to the other side?" asked Harras, disappointed. "It's a stream alright-the materialized stream of time."

  "Nonsense!" answered Rous, turning away from the problem he had so intensively thought about. "Follow me!"

  He walked ahead as though there were no stream in front of him. His foot touched the frozen surface of the water-and found support. Before the other men had rightly understood what they saw with their own eyes, Rous was out in the middle of the water, walking on it. He went ahead, as though the surface were made of stone.

  "It's quite safe," he called back, stopping for a moment. "It would be at least 10 minutes before the water had time to give way beneath my feet."

  It was like walking over ice but completely without the slipperiness. The unmoving waves showed the direction of the wind that had shaped them, just as the bent limbs on the single trees. Judging from the trees, the storm must be quite strong. Yet the men felt nothing of it because for them even a hurricane crawled along at the rate of 1/2 millimeter per second, or less than two meters a minute.

  And then they stood before the wall.

  Rous touched it with his hands and felt a solid resistance. The wall was black but not an absolute solid black, more like a faintly shimmering crystal marble. The darkness began only a few centimeters beyond the outermost, translucent layers.

  Or at least it looked that way.

  The wall was smooth and did not present any seams or cracks where fingers or feet could find a grip. It reached straight up into the sky and seemed to vault over the ground like a dome. The higher it went, the more its color faded. At the zenith it allowed a view of the reddish rays of the sun and even the clouds were visible through it.

  So the LFG created a spherical time-force-field around itself. Rous was convinced that the field extended below ground as well. At the same time he began to suspect they had not yet even begun to see all of the mysterious world of the other dimension. Again the decisive question came to mind:

  What lay beyond the black wall?

  There was only one way to find out but that seemed too risky to Rous: the LFG would have to be turned off while they were in the alien time-dimension. Then the wall would disappear.

  But at the same time the way back would be cut off.

  Rous turned around involuntarily and looked back. He breathed easier as he saw the pale circle of light floating over the ground. It was pure coincidence that he noticed a twisted nearby tree that resembled a gallows.

  "Well, we can't go any farther," observed Steiner quite unnecessarily. "Nobody's going to get through this." He tapped against the wall. "What kind of material can this be?"

  "None at all," said Rous and Noir seemed to agree. "It's energy, nothing else."

  "Energy?" asked Josua, interested. He was the metallurgist of the expedition and the unknown wall thus fell into his area of specialization. "A solid wall of energy? I've never run across anything like that."

  "Now you have," Noir told him. "Think of our ships' defense fields. Throw an object at them and it certainly won't go through."

  The Afroterranian shook his head almost desperately. "But that's the difference, Noir! Our energy screens turn any matter that touches them into energy. But you can touch this wall. It doesn't feel either warm or cold, it doesn't give off deadly bolts of energy and so far it hasn't converted me into energy."

  "You can also touch the neutralized energy dome over Terrania without being destroyed and yet it won't let any matter through," said Steiner after some thought, blasting Josua's argument to nothing. "It can he the same way with this black wall. It's energy produced by our machinery in the Gazelle and so governed by our natural laws. I think that last condition will be the key to a solution if anyone ever wonders how we can remove this barrier sometime."

  "Consider the problem solved," Rous told him a bit gleefully. "But I wouldn't want to walk around this unreal world with the return to our dimension blocked. Only if someone would be stationed in front of the LFG with orders to turn it back on at a certain time."

  "I think we've found a way now to one day penetrate the aliens' world," Noir commented matter?of?factly, stroking the wall thoughtfully with his hand. "Perhaps we would see things a little differently and a little better if we assumed that this barrier really protects us from any dangers that might be lying in wait for us on the other side."

  No one answered, which meant in this case that everyone agreed with him.

  They went another two or 300 meters along the wall, then crossed back over the river, heading towards the shimmering ring waiting for them more than 1000 meters away.

  Ragov suddenly let loose a curse and put his hand to his face. Then he took a step backwards and stared at the tiny object floating motionless in the air just in front of his nose. He had simply walked into it noticing it.

  "An insect!" he murmured in disbelief, shaking his head. "I just had a head-on collision with a fly-and it didn't move an inch!"

  The others collected around the object of collision. It was indeed a sort of fly. It had long feelers, colorfully shining wings, eight delicate legs, and glistening large eyes

  Rous suddenly had the feeling he had spotted a slight motion in this world of absolute immobility.

  The insect...?

  But that was hardly possible even if the little creature flew along at 100 kilometers an hour. At that rate it would move at a relative speed of I centimeter every 20 seconds and movement that slight would be difficult to perceive with the unaided eye in free space.

  But something else connected with the insect did move.

  The wings!

  Now the others saw it too. Very slowly and barely noticeable, to be sure, but without a doubt the iridescent wings were rising. The motion lasted 10 seconds, then they sank down again, only to begin the movement once more half a minute later.

  "One wing-beat per minute!" Harras exclaimed and made some lightning calculations. "Good heavens! This little bug's beating its wings a thousand times a second, alien dimension time. Unbelievable!"

  "There are insects on Earth who beat their wings even faster," Ragov said quietly, watching as the wings reached their highest point and then began to descend. In the last two or three minutes the insect had moved several centimeters ahead. It was relatively swift and actually moved at a speed of some 30 meters a second.

  "If someone shoots at us here," muttered Steiner with a happy tone, "we could easily step out of the bullet's way."

  He calculated half out loud and gave the result beaming with joy. "Yeah, a bullet of the usual type would cover about a meter a minute. It's unbelievable to think about it. We're in a world of slow motion."

  "But," said Rous with a serious edge in his voice, "don't get the idea that you would not be hurt if such a crawl-speed bullet hit you. If you stood still, it would bore into your flesh slowly but surely and kill you."

  "Lovely prospect." The physicist shuddered and went back to staring at the glittering insect, which continued undisturbed its slow flight. "I wonder... could you kill i
t?"

  Rous raised his eyebrows. "Why do you want to kill it? It hasn't done anything to us..."

  "It was only a question," said Steiner. "I only wanted to know if it was possible to kill a living creature of this dimension-I didn't say I actually wanted to do it."

  "Well, I would think it's possible," Rous admitted reluctantly, "but I hope it won't be necessary for us to find out. In our current situation, we are exactly 72,000 times more advanced than the inhabitants of this dimension."

  "So our mission is as good as carried out," Harras broke in triumphantly. "Other than finding a way to defeat our enemies, we have nothing more to do."

  Rous nodded, but without any enthusiasm. "Your quite right, Harras, only we haven't even encountered one of those enemies yet. We don't know what our enemy looks like, who he is and what he's planning. Looking at it that way, our mission is a long way from being completed. It hasn't even begun."

  They went on and accelerated their pace. Josua, who took up the rear and followed a few paces behind, suddenly spoke. "What's that rustling noise? It's coming from somewhere up ahead."

  While the others continued, Rous stopped. "Rustling? I don't hear any rustling noise."

  "It's very deep and low, more like a murmuring. Odd, now it's getting weaker."

  Rous stood still, listening. Now he too heard it but it soon stopped. Thoughtfully, he looked up at the other four men, who had stopped some distance away.

  The rustling...?

  Surprise suddenly showed on his face, then a smile. "Of course! That has to be it! Harras already said it: we're breaking the sound barrier! Josua, it's the sound barrier! A wake or a vacuum is forming in the air behind us as we move. The air flows in and thus your odd noise."

  Rous was happy to have found an explanation and walked ahead.

  The observation with the air reminded him of another problem which he had thought over a number of times with no success. Perhaps he should stop thinking about it...?

  500 meters ahead, the ring of light shimmered. Through it the Terrans could return to their own world. For a moment a question came to the surface in Rous' mind, asking if their arrival in the other dimension had involved a change of physical location or if both worlds co-existed at one and the same spot. Was it just a crazy thought, with no substance behind it, or...?