by Perry Rhodan
"I don't see any alternative," Rous admitted.
"If we really want to go into the direction of Akonar," said Ragov, "We'll have to find some other route."
"We'll never find the city itself," said Steiner in reply, "because it remained behind in the other time plane. Our time plane. But we would find the inhabitants. Maybe we could do something to welcome that conceited Administrator into his new world."
"What would be the use of that if he wouldn't feel anything for three days?" inquired Harras sarcastically.
Rous had meanwhile realized the cause of the haze in the air was the steam from the lava. The thought came to him that the vapors could be poisonous. "We're going back," he announced, starting to retrace his steps. "There wouldn't be any sense in running any unknown risks. At least the air is clean down in the lowlands."
They had covered about one-half the distance back when Ragov suddenly yelled. He raised his arm and pointed to the rock wall on the left. His lips trembled. At first the others did not see what had excited him, for nothing moved. But then, what did move on this crazy world?
"That animal there...!" Ragov stammered frantically. "Don't you see it?"
Rous looked as hard as he could but saw only motionless lumps of rocks of various sizes. Did Ragov mean them?
The Russian lowered his arm, then bent his head so he could hear better. Something was in the air, an odd sound. It sounded like the hollow rumbling of a distant storm. But if the lightning still stood unmoving in the sky, then it was too far away for the thunder to have reached here yet. Sound did not move more than 17 meters an hour.
And yet, that low rumble was in the air.
"...Uuuf... ruuuf... druuf..."
"Can you hear it now, Lieutenant?" asked Ragov. I noticed it the same moment I spotted the animals."
"What animals?" Steiner wanted to know. I don't see any animals."
"They're standing-or crawling-in front of those eaves there." answered Ragov. "I've never seen creatures like them. Are they caterpillars?"
"Caterpillars?" Rous demanded impatiently. "I can't make out any caterpillars. Besides, the distance is still too great to..."
"What I mean," said Ragov quietly, "is that they look like caterpillars but are much bigger. The stones over there in front of the caves..."
The black holes of the caves yawned like open mouths in the rock wall. Irregular stone steps led up to them, narrow paths smoothed by the passage of countless feet. And below, at the beginning of those paths, lay the stones.
The caterpillars...
Now the other men saw them too. The supposed stones were all of the same shape. As though carved from rock, they lay and stood unmoving singly and in groups in various places across the rocky terrain.
And in the air was the never-ending "...ruuuf... druuuuufff..."
"They're living creatures, no doubt about that, and they live in the caves," Ragov said, as though lecturing a biology class, and he walked fearlessly towards the strange creatures. "Since I hadn't run across similar organisms in the normal dimension, I must assume that in all probability these are inhabitants of this time plane. Perhaps they are even our unknown enemy."
Rous had recovered from his surprise. He followed the scholar, who now stood in the midst of the petrified creatures and studied them intensively. The other three men came along too.
They indeed resembled greatly enlarged caterpillars. The wing-sacs on their backs indicated that they could fly or at least had been able to fly at one time. None of the caterpillars were less than a meter and a half long. Instead of fine hair their bodies were encased in dark brown armor shells. Just under the round insect head was a pair of delicately structured limbs obviously evolved for working and grasping, as opposed to the legs all along the rest of the body which evidently served only for locomotion.
"... Druuuf... uuff..."
The strange tones had grown shorter and clearer as the men approached but reverted to their old hollow reverberation when they stood still.
Sound distortion...?
Rous had guessed Steiner's question before he could ask it. "Yes, that's it! The animals here call out their cries, which because of the time lapse reflect into our ears at an unendingly slow rate. To hear how they really sound, we'd have to record them on a tape and play it back 72,000 times faster."
"You're right," Rous agreed. "The animals are communicating with one another. We can't even call them animals anymore since they possess a certain measure of intelligence. Perhaps more than we suspect."
"I wonder if they aren't even the most intelligent beings in this dimension," Rous murmured.
"Could be," Ragov conceded and bent down to look more closely at a caterpillar. "Maybe we'll find out someday."
Rous wanted to say something in reply but the light humming of his ring-radio prevented him from doing so. Josua was calling in.
Rous quickly activated the device. "Yes, Josua? Rous here. What is it?"
The African's voice sounded uncertain. "I don't know if it's anything at all but I thought it would be best to let you know..."
"Yes...?"
"A... a... well, something is above me in the air. I just now saw it. It looks like a ship, about 10 meters long and shaped like a torpedo. It must have come out of the clouds and it's slowly sinking lower. Looks like it's going to land."
The other members of the expedition listened attentively. Rous knew immediately what was in their minds and put it into words. "Josua, you mean to say you can see the ship move?"
"Definitely, Lieutenant. But it's still very slow. At least two hours will go by before it lands-if it lands."
"We're coming back," Rous promised, throwing a regretful glance at the petrified caterpillars. "The landing of a ship seems to me like something important enough to interrupt our investigations here."
"I'll report again if anything happens," Josua said in closing.
Seconds later, Ragov shook his head unhappily. "I wonder if it's right to simply ignore our discovery like this? If only we could take at least one of the caterpillars with us..."
"You know yourself that isn't possible," said Rous, "or at least under these circumstances and without any means of help. If you want to move any of these creatures here, you would need the same amount of energy required to accelerate a man on the Earth to a velocity of 70 kilometers per second inside of one second. Or to put it another way, it would be easier for you to knock a man into orbit around the Earth with your bare fists than to lift one of these caterpillars just I meter. Of course, you could take your time. I would say you would need 20 hours per meter."
Ragov looked around in desperation. "I'm gradually beginning to understand what role the concept of time plays. Only I'm afraid that once I do understand it, I'll go crazy..."
Rous gave the caterpillars one last look and listened to the weird clang of the cries which drove so slowly into his ears. 'We'll come back to take another look at the Druufs but now we'll..."
"The what?" exclaimed Steiner in surprise.
"I called them 'Druufs' because that's what their cries sounded like," Rous explained. "And now we're off to go see about that odd ship which seems to be landing in the area of our light-ring."
Partly relieved and partly discontent, the members of the time expedition took up the march once more.
Even if they had decided to crawl, they could still overtake the future any time...
4/ PHANTOMS OF REALITY
The ship was more than 1,000 meters long and orbited the planet at a great distance. Its interior consisted of an infinity of complicated control devices, automatically functioning alarm installations and chambers filled with positronic instruments. Vague and indefinite figures moved indistinctly through the gloom: they represented the only fife aboard the giant ship.
The ship watched over the planet below, which stood on the edge of the time plane and more than once had penetrated the alien dimension and returned. Each time it had been laden with alien organisms and from overtaking
them the scientists promised a fusion of the two time planes.
And so yet another world had been depopulated without its denizens being able to do anything about it one way or the other.
When the planet returned, it had obtained a new population whose temporal inertia had more or less adjusted its rate of time to that of the new dimension.
For the aliens it had been a bitter lesson: by the first meeting they had recognized the fact that their own dimension was not the relatively normal and real one, but the one theirs was cutting across. They had to adjust to it if they did not want to live from now on like exiles. What could be lonelier than being an exile of time?
Videoscreens lit up and indicators flew over illuminated dials. Somewhere deep inside the ship reactors hummed. The robot surveillance over the planet was in operation.
The aliens were naturally well aware of their relationship to the other universe. All organic beings on the other time plane lived 72,000 times more quickly than they and only with the help of complicated apparatus and instruments could they be made visible. It was all reminiscent of a technology of unimaginable slow-motion photography. The films had to race through the cameras at high speed and then be run in the projectors at a vastly slower pace for even fleeting shadows to show on the screens.
But when one of their worlds penetrated the other plane, the organisms brought back with it had adapted to the new rate of time. Perhaps it would be possible to aim at merging the two dimensions...
Figures sped here and there; they could not be made out.
The screens looked identical but each was different. The first screen on the left stood relatively empty. On it distant mountains could be seen across a wide plane, separated from the viewer by valleys and rivers in between. The sky was clouded over and it was about to rain at any second. A storm was brewing along the horizon and the first lightning raced out of the sky towards the ground.
The second screen showed precisely the same picture but the speed of events had been slowed down. The caterpillar-like creatures still moved with some degree of speed but the water in the streams already seemed to be flowing more slowly. The overall view was the same as that on the first screen: it showed the plane, the mountains and the rivers.
Only on the third screen was the slow motion beginning to appear with any obviousness. The fascinating aspect about it was the certainty that the view on the screen was not merely slow motion due to photographic tricks but a living slow motion.
The fourth screen depicted events slowed by more than half.
On the fifth screen the lightning crawled towards the ground and the rain fell as though each drop hung at the end of an invisible thread someone only hesitantly reeled out. The caterpillars now barely moved; they seemed to have become the laziest creatures in the universe.
The first shadows flitted across the curved surface of the sixth screen. Since movement had been slowed by 60,000 on this screen and the figures were recognizable only as shadows, one could well imagine how fast these phantoms were in reality.
By the 10th screen the shadows moved normally and could be made out. But the motion had been so slowed down that all normal life seemed to be petrified. The storm and the lightning seemed like a painting. The rain hung glued in the air and the rivers looked as though frozen. Only the shadows of the beings from another dimension moved normally, as though unaffected by what was around them.
Indefinable faces bent over the 10th screen.
• • •
At that moment Rous had the feeling of being watched.
He found it impossible to explain the sensation: he simply felt it and had to accept it at that. It was sheer nonsense, of course, since there was no one in sight who could observe him.
Ragov did not laugh when Rous spoke of his feeling.
"Why couldn't we be observed?" the biologist asked. "Doesn't the coming landing of the ship bear witness to that? But we still don't know if it even intends to land. Perhaps..."
"Perhaps...?"
"Perhaps it's remote-controlled and was sent-to observe us! That could be it! We don't know anything about the intelligences of this time plane but that doesn't mean we should underestimate them. In any case, I'm not comfortable thinking about the Druufs. There's more to them than they're willing to let show."
They walked across the plane and crossed the river that had once flowed just inside the black wall. They recognized the gallows tree in the distance and in front of it a familiar figure-Josua.
And the ship floated just 100 meters overhead.
Rous switched on his ring-transmitter. "What is it, Josua? Isn't the ship going to land?"
"It's stopped," the voice of the African replied. "It isn't sinking any farther. It isn't going to land at all. I wonder if it's seen us?"
"Impossible!" We're moving much too fast." Rous had an uncertain feeling as he said it. He was suddenly not so convinced that the Druufs could not see them. If they had any knowledge of technology at all-and that had to be the case since they built spaceships-then they could have succeeded also in breaking through the time barrier.
The other Terrans required five minutes to reach Josua. Above them floated the motionless ship.
Rous found his suspicions confirmed. "An observation station," he said, pointing upwards. "Do you see the different cameras pointed at us? I bet it's a relay station of some sort. They're photographing us with television cameras and then transmitting the picture somewhere else-although where that is I don't know either. Perhaps to one of their cities or to another ship."
"You don't think anyone's aboard?" asked Steiner. "A robot-guided ship, maybe?"
"I can't be certain," said Rous, "but I am convinced that this little ship is nothing more than an auxiliary vessel for some larger ship. The aliens don't want to expose themselves to any danger so they send a portable TV camera. We wouldn't do it much differently if we were in their shoes."
Steiner's eyes narrowed. "Answer two questions for me, Lieutenant, and I won't say another thing."
"Ask away!"
"First: why are their cameras so obvious? Second: why are there at least eight or 10 cameras trained on us? Wouldn't one be enough?"
A few creases showed on Rous' forehead as he thought over the physicist's questions. He knew that the scientist would not ask any questions without good reasons for them. The answer was not very simple, either.
"Why the cameras were not sunk farther into the ship, I don't know. It would be hard to find a plausible answer for that. But to your second question, I think I can find an explanation. Let's take an example: if I have two or three tape recorders I can stretch or condense music as I like. If a piece normally takes three minutes to play, its simple enough for me to convert it into an impulse of three seconds by recording it at a slow speed and playing it back at a fast. I could also stretch a three minute piece out to three hours and every single note would last for minutes."
"Great," said Steiner. "So what does that prove?"
"Transfer your acoustic experience into the realm of optics. The aliens want to see us. So what do they have to do? They're photographing us with their cameras, going simultaneously from one camera to another. The pace of events is slowed-and the aliens, who live 72,000 times more slowly than us can see us."
Steiner looked up at the unmoving ship standing just over them. "They can see us?" he murmured uncertainly. "Then we aren't safe here any longer. If they decide to do it, they'll kill us..."
How can they do that?"
"If they can slow events down enough to see them with their own eyes, then they can surely find some means of shooting at us fast enough to hit us."
Rous nodded slowly but gave no answer. Mute, he looked up at the small camera-ship floating motionless over a dead world.
• • •
"They must not be allowed to live!"
"Why not?"
"Their influence is harmful to the fusion process of the time planes. If we leave them alive, they would remain aliens forever.
They can't get back to their own dimension."
"How did they get into ours in the first place?"
The answer was not immediately forthcoming. Nothing had changed on the 10 differently paced videoscreens. The six men could be clearly made out. They looked upwards as though searching for something. Everything else had been frozen into immobility. On the horizon the lightning still stood in the sky, an awesome picture of time suddenly stopped in its tracks.
"We don't know but it's the second time beings retaining their own time rate have come to us. That means a blow to our purposes. If a fusion is to take place, then the others must assume our time rate."
"But the other plane is stronger, larger..."
"But we aren't going to give up!"
Again there was a pause.
An order finally emerged from the command center and it put to rest all thoughts of compromise.
The order read:
"Kill them...!"
• • •
Ivan Ragov looked at the ship for some time, then said, bored: "What do I care about that? If it's going to land, it might take hours or even days. I'll be back by then."
"Back?" demanded Rous. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"I'm going to take a look at the caterpillars-the Druufs, as you called them. Maybe I'll find the key."
"Don't go by yourself, Ragov. Andr? Noir should go with you. Perhaps he might even be helpful to you."
Noir was not very enthusiastic but he realized that the scientist could not be left to run about the mountains alone. And it was clear that Ragov could not be swayed from his intention.
After it was agreed that any new development would be reported by radio to the others, the two men left.
Rous, Steiner, Harras and Josua remained behind.
They watched Ragov and Noir go, then turned their attention back to the alien ship.
Rous noticed it first. "It's moving, Steiner! Sideways! Slowly... but it's moving!"