The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  But he did not bring it downward in a vigorous, forward thrust. Instead he held it steady, and from it there came a sheet of almost blinding flame.

  The man in the surf remained invisible for a moment, completely enveloped in what looked like a fireball dancing above the surf, outshining the noonday sun.

  Then the fireball vanished, and he came into view again. He was rising unsteadily to his feet, his arms dangling loosely at his side. He walked slowly forward until he was standing well beyond the breakers, a vacant look on his face. So totally vacant was that look that there could be no mistaking it, even from where Blakemore and Faran were standing.

  “Just his arms are paralyzed,” Faran said. “The paralysis will wear off in about ten minutes, and his memory will come back. But that will give us time to make sure that he’s safely behind—not lock and key, exactly, but a sliding panel that will keep him just as securely imprisoned.”

  He turned abruptly and gestured to Tyson.

  “All right,” he shouted. “Make him walk. He told us how to go about it. He’s helpless now, has to obey you. But you’ve got to prod him a little.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll see to it!” Tyson called back. “I can lift him up and carry him—if I have to.”

  “If you train that three-pronged weapon on a man’s legs he can’t walk,” Faran said, answering the unspoken question in Blakemore’s eyes. “But Roger was careful not to do that. The flare you saw is highly selective in range, and that’s about all we know about it—except that it does something very strange to the mind.”

  Faran looked down at the weapon he was still clasping and lowered it carefully to the sand. “I know even less about this one,” he said. “I’m not sure I could manipulate the right trigger-mechanisms if my life depended on it. But take a good look at it. When would you say our present technology will have taken a big enough leap forward to make possible the construction of a weapon as complicated as that?”

  Blakemore bent down, and made a close examination of the weapon on the sand, seeing it at close range and in detail for the first time. Not only was it complex beyond belief. There was something about it that hurt his brain when he concentrated on it, making him feel that his temples were being compressed in a vise. There were at least thirty intricately constructed parts, none of which looked exactly like a trigger-mechanism, and a few of them seemed neither triangular nor round, but in some strange way warped out of geometric alignment with—well, the way they should have looked. Or possibly it was just their metallic brightness that made them seem to blend and separate and run together again, assuming more impossible configurations the longer he stared at them.

  “If you put the date about a century from now—say in 2210 or 2220—I’d have to agree with you,” Faran went on slowly, “because that’s when weapons like that were in common use. Also the three-pronged one which Roger couldn’t have used with more precision and skill if it had come into his hands long before it did. In fact—”

  Faran paused abruptly, his eyes darting to the surf line again. The man from the wheat was now walking unsteadily across the sand with the trident pressed to the small of his back. There was no unsteadiness in Tyson’s determined stride.

  “Funny thing about Roger,” Faran said. “He has the basic maturity of a man—well, crowding forty at least. But he has a yearling colt side, and sometimes it gets out of control. A moment ago he was parading around the beach with that weapon solely to enhance his image in Gilda’s eyes. But I suppose few men are above indulging in that kind of harmless vanity at times. Those who can’t I’ve never particularly liked.”

  He paused an instant, then added: “Roger felt that weapon went with the sea, made him feel like Poseidon. As you’ve probably noticed, it looks like a trident.” Blakemore had an impulse to throw back his head and laugh, feeling that unrestrained mirth was the only antidote to a coincidence so incredible that it could not be reconciled with reality. But was it, after all, so unheard of? Did it not simply confirm what he had never seriously doubted—that human thinking, on certain occasions, could follow an identical pattern in two or more individuals?

  Given youthful exuberance, a robust build, and a half-humorous impulse to strike a pose might not the temptation to assume the role of a sea god prove irresistible, even in the absence of a Gilda?

  There was a little of the actor in everyone, and Blakemore could picture himself in the same role, planting the shining trident in the sand with a vigorous, downward thrust and watching it quiver like a flagpole above the mirroring surface of the waves while he shouted to the dolphins to draw nearer on the rising tide.

  It cost him an effort to keep looking at Faran as the latter talked, for the weapon at his feet still amazed him, and he could not quite share Faran’s feeling that all would go well on the surf line, and Tyson would succeed in making the gaunt man obey his every command.

  “It will be difficult for you to accept the fact that we’ve actually traveled in time,” Faran was saying. “But a start has to be made. Since we’ve only got a minute or two to spare it might be better if we just thought of it as a start. I’m not sure exactly how fast Malador’s memory may return and Roger may need help.”

  “Malador? You mean that’s actually his name?”

  Faran nodded. “His only name. It’s surprising how many of the names we’re familiar with—everyday names like Brown, Goldsmith, Henderson—have survived unchanged for well over a century. But his happens to be one of the new, unusual ones.”

  It occurred to Blakemore that many present-day names had remained unchanged since the Middle Ages, particularly European ones. But he experienced not the slightest desire to interrupt Faran by reminding him of that.

  Faran paused anyway, shading his eyes and staring toward where Tyson and the near-skeleton figure were still moving along the beach with no change in their relative positions.

  For the first time Blakemore realized that the direction in which they were heading was bringing them nearer a distant section of the beach which was familiar to him. It would have been just a sloping stretch of sand with no distinguishing characteristics if the wedge-shaped object he had seen from the air an instant before the crash had not towered in the middle of it. It was the first time he had looked in that direction, for what had happened between the sea wall and the surf line in the immediate vicinity had kept him totally occupied.

  But now he saw it clearly. It no longer looked as it had in the brief glimpse he’d caught of it from the air. It was still mottled gray and black, but it had a solid, metallic look, a mechanical look that made what he had first thought it might be—a gigantic skate cast up by the tide to dry out and darken in the sunlight—seem an absurdity. The pinkish patches which were visible here and there could easily, he told himself, have been produced by—well, the kind of firing that can raise a rocket from its launching pad enveloped in a sheet of flame. It could have accounted for the mottling as well.

  Seemingly Faran had followed the direction of his gaze and guessed correctly as to the trend his thoughts had taken, for he was nodding now with an unmistakable look of understanding in his eyes. Although he did not even gesture toward the wedge-shaped object, his expression said as plain as words, “Yes, that’s it, Blakemore. That’s the time-traveling vehicle that everyone thought could never be built.”

  He seemed content to assume, as he went on, that Blakemore could hardly have failed to recognize it for what it was.

  “We had no intention, originally, of cutting our journey short and returning without finding out what the real future will be like,” he said. “A century is no more than an extension of the present, in a sense. There are certain to be changes. But when there’s a general hopelessness—and barring some cataclysmic event that puts an end to everything—it doesn’t provide enough time for the shadows to do more than lengthen and deepen.”

  “The real future,” Blakemore heard himse
lf saying. “Just how many years did you have in mind?”

  “A thousand, at least,” Faran replied. “Two thousand perhaps. Everything will be changed by then—for better or for worse. There are limitations on how far we can travel—technological ones. We cannot travel back into the past, however problem-solving that might be. I doubt if we should like what we’d find there, or that the presence of twenty-first century man would be tolerated in the past for long. It may not be tolerated in the future, but that is a risk we shall have to take.”

  “Why did you come back?” Blakemore asked. “Since you seem so determined to make a much longer journey I don’t see why you didn’t continue on. When you start to do something that takes years of planning, when it’s that big and that frightening—it is frightening, you know—the natural human tendency is to go through with it while you’re in a keyed-up, hyper-sensitive state. There are emotions that can’t last and you’d need them, I should think, to travel through Time for ten or twenty centuries.”

  “Yes, you’re right about that,” Faran said. “But an unexpected technological difficulty developed when we reached the early years of the twenty-second century. Overcoming it will not be a seriously time-delaying problem. But it compelled me to balance the temptation to continue on against the wisdom of returning and making absolutely sure that nothing will go wrong. And when I made that decision I immediately made another one that seems to have been the opposite of wise. By bringing Malador back with us I felt that I could—”

  Gilda Faran had remained silent for so long that Blakemore had almost forgotten she was still at their side. But now she was tugging at her father’s arm and pointing along the beach, causing him to break off abruptly.

  “Roger’s not going to have any trouble with him,” she said. “They stopped walking for an instant and I was afraid— But now he’s waving. Look, Dad! He wants you to know, I think, they’ll be inside in about ten more seconds.”

  Far down the beach Tyson was shouting as he waved, but his voice, although whipped by the wind, failed to carry distinctly to where they were standing. But there was something in his attitude that conveyed reassurance, and the few words which Blakemore caught left no doubt in his mind that Faran’s daughter had not been mistaken.

  In another moment both figures had disappeared from view.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Faran said. “When Roger’s inside just five steps will take him to a compartment that has all the safeguards of a prison cell. If Malador was a criminal, which he’s not, he might be able to pick a lock. But a sliding panel that can be hermetically sealed is as secure a safeguard as anything of that nature you’ll find in the twenty-second century. There are a few things you can’t improve on much, even in an age when prisons have mushroomed out.”

  Faran stared across the beach to the offshore lighthouse, and a somber look came into his eyes, as if in the few places where the sea had turned a leaden gray he could see beneath the waves a lost city of dreadful night, where the buildings had turned the same leaden color and half of them were massive structures that could well have been prisons, or something worse.

  “I’m sure Roger is no longer in the slightest danger,” he said. “And there’s something I think you should know. It concerns Malador and what I started to tell you about him. It’s something I couldn’t have anticipated and it’s not an easy thing to talk about. But when there’s something ugly weighing on your mind it’s a mistake to keep it under wraps. The best time to talk about it, I think, is right now.

  “If I had thought Roger couldn’t handle Malador alone,” he continued, after a pause, “I wouldn’t have told you as much as I have. There would have been no time for that. But with a man like Roger it’s not too good an idea to go rushing in with an offer of help when he’s doing all right by himself and would prefer to keep it a one-man job. Unless help is needed it’s the best way of convincing a man that you’ve supreme confidence in him, and it helps him to stay steady. Otherwise you’d just be rocking the boat.”

  “I could never think of you as doing that, Dad,” his daughter said. “When you’re in a boat—or anywhere else—you contribute nothing but steadiness.”

  “Well—that seems to confirm what I told Blakemore,” Faran said. “Contrary to popular belief, a daughter can be more of a problem than a son. But if she can grow up believing that about you, you can hardly say it hasn’t been worth it. It’s not true, of course. I can become unsteady right down to my soles, when decisions have to be made with split-second timing.”

  “That’s nonsense and you know it,” his daughter said.

  “Not entirely,” Blakemore said, coming to Faran’s defense. “I’m pretty sure Columbus and Drake felt that way at times.” Then his expression became troubled again.

  “What were you going to tell me about Malador?” he asked.

  “I saw an opportunity to prove, beyond any possibility of doubt, that time travel is an accomplished fact,” Faran said. “Weapons and other objects from the future can undermine skepticism to a certain extent. To a man with your background they can perhaps carry absolute conviction. I’ve a feeling that you are no longer wavering between belief and doubt. But in general, the belief would persist that I had the inventive capacity to fake even so complex a weapon as the one you just examined. There is no substitute for a living witness.”

  “But wouldn’t the time machine itself—or whatever you’ve decided to call it—be just as convincing?” Blakemore asked, “If you invited someone to accompany you whose word would not be doubted?”

  “I can think of no one whose word would not be doubted,” Faran said. “And anyway—I would not care to undertake that kind of demonstration. I can do without a passenger who would be sure to be antagonistic from the start and might well become convinced that he’d made the trip under hypnosis or I’d put an hallucination-creating drug in his food or something of the sort.”

  “But could you prove that Malador is actually from the future?” Blakemore persisted. “He could be hallucinating too—or so a great many people would believe. Judging from his behavior, the safest place for him right now would be a mental institution.”

  “I can assure you that Malador is completely sane, unless you prefer to believe that a violent, uncontrollable rage can only occur in the insane. That’s hardly tenable, you know. And I shouldn’t have to remind you that we have the psychological means today of determining with absolute—or close to absolute—accuracy whether or not a man’s personality is sufficiently intact to rule out psychotic behavior and the rigid, persistent system of delusions that usually accompany it.”

  It was true, of course, Blakemore realized, recalling what he had himself said to his wife about the comparison chart techniques before going in pursuit of the man. They could quickly remove all doubt as to whether a man who claimed to come from the future was telling the truth, since they could even expose as a fraud the infinitely complex and ingenious memory structures which believers in reincarnation sometimes came up with, in an effort to prove they could recall a thousand and one details of their previous lives.

  “You may be right about Malador’s importance,” Blakemore conceded. “But it would take considerable time to overcome the way millions of people feel about time travel. On decision-making levels you’d encounter just as much anger and resistance. Wouldn’t all that interfere with your plans?”

  “It would,” Faran said. “But if something should delay me, and I should need more technological assistance than seems likely at the moment, Malador—just my ability to produce him—could make me feel the way a man does when he has more insurance than he would ordinarily need. It’s a good way to feel. When there’s a widespread hostility you never know just how much insurance you’ll need.”

  “Did you force him to return with you?” Blakemore asked.

  Faran shook his head. “No. He desperately wanted to come and that helped me to make up my mind
.”

  “There’s something you’ve left out, Dad,” Faran’s daughter said. “It was just as hard for you as it was for me to watch all hope die in the eyes of the hundreds of starving men and women we talked to, when we told them we could only save one of them. Two perhaps—but there would have been a great risk in adding fifty pounds more of weight—or so you told me—when the stabilizing units were giving you trouble. But if you’d been alone, with just your own safety to consider, Malador would have had a companion. That girl who kept clinging to my knees, and sobbing or the little boy with big, sad eyes who would have made Oliver Twist seem chubby. Don’t deny it, Dad. You can’t, because it’s true.”

  “Starvation can be a terrible thing,” Faran said. “How did you expect me to feel?”

  “Thanks, Dad—for coming out of your shell,” Gilda said. “I wish you’d do that more often.”

  “If I’d drawn further into it, or hardened the outer casing, Blakemore would have been spared what just happened,” Faran said. “To come that close to getting killed can be a terrible thing too. And I don’t like what I’m going to have to tell him, because it will be harder for him than it is for me to accept the fact that there’s a brighter side to it.”

  He turned and looked directly at Blakemore. “The brighter side is tremendous, because human tyranny can’t endure forever. Eventually it will collapse under its own weight and what you’ve accomplished will make Johnny Appleseed dwindle to a pygmy legend lost in the mists of time.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Faran fell silent for an instant, and before he could continue something made it impossible for him to do anything but shade his eyes and stare past the lighthouse to where the sea had darkened to an almost purplish hue. There are compulsions which just a startling, totally unexpected sight can impose, enforcing silence with as much authority as a human voice issuing a command.

  Blakemore experienced it too, the feeling that he must look seaward, that he could not fight against the magnet-like tug that the great ship that was coming into view around a bend in the coastline was exerting.