The Legion of Time

by Jack Williamson

  Everything was dim now, around him, and flickering like the blue abyss in which the time ship rode. He saw Wil McLan scramble up a ladder. But the floor was giving away. His running feet sank deep, as if its bright metal had crumbled into rust. He caught his breath, and clutched out desperately, and fell. The last wraith of the building flickered away. Jonbar was gone. Beneath, under the empty night, lay only a featureless dark plain. He fell toward it, a cold wind screaming up about him.

  “Farewell!” a malicious golden voice was pealing, and Lanning saw the long yellow shell flash by, Sorainya and Glarath lying together on its cushions. He fell past them, and the wind took his breath.

  But then the Chronion flashed down beside him. The yellow ray flared from her crystal gun, and drew him to the rail. Barry Halloran hauled him safely aboard.

  CHAPTER IX - GEODESICS TO GYRONCHI

  The ship in a moment was back in her timeless blue abyss, driving through the ceaseless flicker of possibility. Lanning hastened to join Wil McLan beneath the crystal dome, and asked his agonized question:

  “Lethonee is gone—dead?”

  “Not dead.” McLan’s haunted eyes rested on him sadly. “For she was never born. Jonbar was merely a faint probability of future time, which we illuminated for an instant with the power of the temporal ray. This last triumph of Sorainya has eliminated the geodesies that might have led to its existence. The reflection, therefore, vanished.”

  “Sorainya—” gasped Lanning. “What has she done?” He clutched McLan’s twisted arm. “Did you discover— anything?”

  The old man nodded slowly.

  “In the last hour, before the laboratory was obliterated—”

  “Yes?” Lanning urged him on.

  “A moment, my boy,” he whispered. “Seems the priests of the gyrane must have learned more than I thought from their examination of the Chronion. Sorainya’s golden shell, as you know, is merely a projected temporal image. But now Glarath has built an actual time ship.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s heavier than the Chronion, armored for war. It carries a horde of Sorainya’s anthropoid ants.”

  “And they used that, against Jonbar?”

  “They went back into the past,” said the voiceless-man. “Back to the turning point of probability. They found something there—it must have been a small material object, although we got no glimpse of it—which was the very foundation of Jonbar. Using gyrane power, they wrenched the thing, whatever it was, out of its place in time. The broken geodesies cut off the possibility of Jonbar.”

  “What became of this object?”

  “They kept it concealed. And they carried it back to Gyronchi. It is guarded, there, in Sorainya’s fortress.”

  “Guarded?” Lanning echoed. His fingers twisted together in a sudden agony of hope, and his eyes rose to search McLan’s wealed face. “Then if we took it—carried it back—would that help Jonbar?”

  Desperately, he seized McLan’s thin shoulder.

  “Can—can anything bring back Lethonee?”

  “Yes.” The bent white head moved to a tiny nod. “If we could recover the object, if we could discover where they found it, in space and time, if we could put it back there, if we could prevent Sorainya from disturbing it again until the turning point has passed in the fifth dimension—then Jonbar would again be possible.”

  Lanning’s fist smashed into his palm. “Then we must do that.”

  “Yes,” whispered Wil McLan, very softly, “we must do that.” A solemn light had come into his haggard eyes, and his broken hand softly touched Lanning’s arm. “This is the mission for which we gathered your legion, Denny—although the details have not been clear until now.”

  “Okay,” Lanning said. “Let’s go!”

  “We are now retracing the broken geodesies of Jonbar,” McLan told him, “back toward your own time. There we can pick up the branching world lines of Gyronchi, and follow them forward again, to seek that guarded object.”

  “And let Sorainya look out!”

  But McLan caught Lanning’s arm again, with a firmer grasp.

  “I must warn you, Denny. Don’t be too hopeful—we need every bit of caution. The odds are all against us. A dozen

  men against all Gyronchi. Jonbar can help us no more. Even the surgeons we had aboard vanished with all the rest.” “We’ll beat ‘em,” Lanning was muttering. “We’ve got to.”

  But he saw McLan’s haunted eyes.

  “It’s thirty years since I first saw Sorainya.” The old man spoke as if to himself, absently fingering the worn silver tube that hung from his throat. “A glorious flame that lured me across the gulf of time. I—I loved her.”

  Tears burst into his hollow eyes, and his gulp was a startling little sound.

  “Fifteen years—” he rasped again, “since I found what a demon she is.” Some deep-hidden agony throbbed in his words. “I hate Sorainya! She tricked me, tortured me, maimed me forever! She—she—” Something seemed to choke him. “But still—for all her monstrous evil—could I kill Sorainya? Could any man?”

  Lanning’s own fists were knotted.

  “I have seen her,” he said hoarsely. “And I don’t know.” Then he strode suddenly across the room and back, moved by an inner agony. “But we must—to save Jonbar.”

  “We must,” echoed the man she had broken. “If we can!”

  A week, ship’s time, had passed, when the dials registered 1921.

  “Here,” Wil McLan told Lanning, “the last broken geodesic of Jonbar joins reality. In this year, it is just possible, we may find the apex of that new cone of probability formed when Glarath took the object out of time—if we can ever come back to search.”

  The Chronion came briefly out of her blue, flickering gulf, high above the brilliant blue Pacific where the circle of an atoll glistened green and white about a pale lagoon. In an instant they were gone again, back through the blur of multitudinous possibility, down the geodesic track of Gyronchi.

  Lanning and Schorn were drilling the men on the deck when the attack came, yet it was an utter surprise. Jaunty little Jean Querard, leaping from his place in the line, screamed the first warning:

  “Grand Dieu! A ship from hell!”

  Turning, Lanning saw a black shadow against the shimmering blue. It vanished, reappeared, flickered, became suddenly real. The tune ship from Gyronchi!

  Three tunes the Chromon s length, it was massively armored. The ends were two immense square plates, which shone with the same greenish glow as the Chronion’s polar disks. Black muzzles frowned from the side, and the deck was crowded with a black-armored horde of Sorainya’s half-human warriors.

  On a high quarter-deck, Lanning thought he glimpsed the black-robed angularity of Glarath. But it disappeared. A dazzling white beam jetted from a projecting tube. A two-foot section of the Chronion’s rail turned incandescent and exploded, fused and vaporized.

  “Lie flat!” ordered Lanning. “Fire at will!” He shouted to Schorn: “Get the Maxims going!”

  But what could bullets do against that terrible energy? He ran to the speaking tube, forward, that communicated with McLan.

  “Wil!” he sobbed. “What now?”

  The white beam flashed again behind him. And Israel Enders, kneeling to fire, collapsed in a smoking huddle. There was one brief scream, agony-thinned. And bright flame burst up from a little heap of burned cloth and seared flesh and fused metal.

  With an answering scream that was the echo of his brother’s, Isaac Enders fed a belt of ammunition into his Maxim, and sprayed lead at Sorainya’s monsters, who were leveling their guns. Their bullets spattered the Chronion.

  The hoarse tortured whisper came back at last from McLan:

  “The Chronion’s no battle ship. We can’t fight the gyrane ray.”

  “Then what?”

  “Outrun them!” rasped McLan. “The only hope. The Chronion’s lighter. Hold ‘em off! And I’ll try—”

  Blinded by blood from a wound on h
is forehead, the Austrian, von Arneth, was fumbling with his jammed Maxim. Lanning ran to the gun, burned his fingers freeing the hot action, and trained it on the port from which the ray had flashed.

  He hammered lead at the black-armored ship, but it kept drifting nearer. Another volley from the giants screamed around him. The white ray stabbed again. One of the Maxims exploded. Willie Rand, behind it, rolled moaning on the deck, beating at his flaming garments.

  This couldn’t go on! Shuddering, Lanning fed another belt into his own gun. A few of Sorainya’s creatures had fallen, yet the battle was clearly hopeless. He listened. Was the throb beneath the deck a little swifter?

  The great black ship had slipped close, before he could fire again. Swinging their golden axes, the humanoid ants lined the rail. Were they preparing to board? Lanning tilted up the Maxim, to rake them. But a thick black tube crept down, stopped in line with him. His breath caught. It was time for that fearful ray. Blinding fire exploded at him—

  But the enemy ship flickered and vanished. Lanning left his hot gun and stumbled to the speaking tube.

  “Wil?” he called.

  “We’ve outrun them, Denny,” came McLan’s voiceless rasp. “I think we can keep a little ahead, along the time dimension. But they’ll be back to Gyronchi close behind us, with their warning. And we’ve already lost—how many men?”

  Lanning turned to survey the battle-cluttered deck. The tall grim-faced Canadian was on his knees beside the smoking remains of his brother, sobbing. Barry Halloran was dressing von Arneth’s wound. Willie Rand, his clothing still smoking, was groping about the deck, cursing in a soft, wary monotone. Lanning saw his eyes, and felt a shock of horror. Staring wide and blank from his red seared face, they were cooked white from the ray, blind.

  “Israel Enders dead,” he reported to McLan, in a sick voice. “Von Arneth wounded. Rand blind. One Maxim destroyed, by that terrible ray—”

  “The gyrane” rasped McLan. “The odds are all against us, Denny. We must avoid another battle—if we can. But now that they are warned—”

  The whisper faded, on a note of tired despair.

  Wrapped in a sheet, to which were pinned a tiny Canadian flag and the silver star of Jonbar, the remains of Israel Enders and his fused rifle were consigned to the shimmering gulf of time—where, McLan said, having the velocity of the ship they would drift on into ultimate futurity.

  The deck was cleared, the broken rail mended. The guns were cleaned and repaired. Atomic converters throbbing swiftly, polar plates glowing green, the Chronion plunged on down the track of probability, toward Gyronchi.

  Erich von Arneth came up from the hospital, with a new livid scar across his forehead. Asking for a Mauser whose lock was broken. Willie Rand sat for long hours on the deck, bandaged head bowed, whetting its gleaming bayonet and testing the edge with his thumb.

  On the bridge, Lanning and Wil McLan watched the crystal block of the chronoscope, using its temporal ray to scan Gyronchi, seeking out the best instant for the raid. They failed, however, to look actually into Sorainya’s mighty citadel, to find the object they sought to recover.

  “Another application of the gyrane” rasped Wil McLan. “An interfering field, set up about the metal walls, that damps out the temporal radiation.” A stern light glinted in his hollow eyes. “But I know Sorainya’s fortress,” he added grimly.

  “With Lethonee’s aid, planning that escape, I memorized every inch of it.”

  His broken fingers mapped it, for Lanning and Schorn.

  “The great strong room,” he said, “where Sorainya keeps her treasure, is in the eastern tower. It is reached only by a ladder through a trap door in the floor of Sorainya’s own apartments. And the great hall, outside, through which you must enter, is guarded always by a hundred warriors.

  “It must be a sudden strike,” he added. “A moment lost, a wasted step, can finish us.”

  And at last a moment came when he spun the shining wheel and tapped a key, to stop the time ship in Gyronchi. apter 10

  CHAPTER X - IN SORAINYA’S CITADEL

  In the somber dusk of a cloudy day, the Chronion first paused in Sorainya’s world. Tiny fields, the broad, river dully silver in the twilight, sprawled miserable villages—and a blackened, barren patch where Lanning had seen one village burned. The twin hills beyond, topped with the temple of the gyrane and Sorainya’s citadel.

  Standing on the deck, Lanning scanned the fortress through binoculars. A mountainous, frowning pile of the eternal crimson alloy, it had been the fastness of Sorainya’s dynasty, he knew from the chronoscope, for half a thousand years. Scores of the black-armored fighters, glittering with the gold and scarlet of their weapons, were marching in sentry duty along the high battlements. And Lanning saw, mounted cannon-like upon the walls, a dozen of the thick black tubes that projected the gyrane ray.

  “Gott in Himmel!” rumbled Emil Schorn at his side. “Der thing we must recover is in that castle, nein? It looks a verdammt stubborn nut to crack!”

  “It is,” said Lanning. “One slip, and we are lost. There must be no slip.” He handed the glasses to the Prussian. “We have only paused here to look over the ground by daylight,” he swiftly explained. “We are to land after midnight on that ledge that breaks the north precipice— see it?”

  “Ja!”

  “Sorainya herself will then be gone to visit Glarath in his temple—so we saw in the chronoscope. And perhaps 62 The Legion of Time

  at that hour her guards will not be too alert. Our landing party must climb to the little balcony above, where the skeleton hangs—”

  “Ach, Gott! A dizzy climb!”

  “The little door on the balcony gives into the dungeons. Wil McLan has the keys he carved there, for his escape. We’ll enter through the dungeons, and try to reach the great hall above. Is that all clear?”

  “Ja! Clear as death.”

  Lanning waved his arm to Wil McLan, in his crystal dome, and the Chronion slipped again into the shadowy gulf of time. The landing party gathered on the foredeck. A grim, silent little band—save for Barry Halloran, who tried to make them join in a college yell for Jonbar. Isaac Enders and von Arneth were to carry two of the Maxims. Cresto and Courtney-Pharr packed the fifty-pound tripods. The ethers were laden with climbing ropes, rifles, grenades, and ammunition.

  Boris Barinin set up the remaining gun, to guard the ship. And blinded Willie Rand sat silently beside him, breathing white cigarette smoke and whetting at the bayonet of his broken gun.

  And the Chronion plunged into the blackness of a wet midnight. The overwhelming mass of Sorainya’s citadel was a vague shadow in the clouds, as the time ship slipped silently down to the high narrow ledge. A cold rain drizzled on the deck, and a bitter wind howled about the battlements above.

  Noiseless as a shadow, the Chronion settled among the gnarled and stunted brush that clung to the ledge. Limping down from his bridge, Wil McLan handed Lanning three white keys carved from human bone.

  “For the balcony entrance,” he whispered. “For the dungeon doors. And the inside gate. But I’ve none for the strong room—you must find some other way.” His broken hand tightened like a claw on Lanning’s arm. “I’ve told you all I can, Denny. You’ll pass through the prison where I lay for ten years. We may all rot there, if you fail. Don’t fail!”

  Burdened with Mauser, coiled rope, and a hamper of grenades, Lanning led the way over the rail and up the precipitous cliff. The mossy rock was slippery with mist.

  In Sorainya’s Citadel 63

  Wet cold numbed him. The wind tugged at him with icy, treacherous hands. In the darkness he could see nothing save bulking vague shadows; he had to grope and fumble for the way.

  Knives of granite cut his fingers, and damp cold deadened them. Once he slipped, and clawed at the sharp rock to catch himself, scraping flesh away. An age-long instant, he hung by the snapping fingers of one hand.

  But he recovered himself, and climbed again. He came at last to a stout little o
ak, well anchored in a crevice, that he had seen through the binoculars. He knotted a rope to it, tested its strength, and dropped the coil to the men below.

  He climbed on. Icy gusts of wind beat at him. The rain, in bigger, colder drops, chilled him through. Pale lightning flashed once above, and he shivered with dread that it might reveal them.

  He fastened another rope about a projecting spur of rock, and dropped it back, and climbed again. Trembling with strain, he came at last to the narrow rugged ledge where the precipice of stone joined the sheer unscalable precipice of crimson metal. Wedging his bayonet in a fissure, he anchored another rope. He had begun to inch his way along the ledge, when he heard a stifled scream beneath.

  He froze. A long silence. Something crashed faintly, far below. Shuddering, he waited. The storm moaned dismally about the battlements, still hundreds of feet above. There was no alarm. On hands and knees, he crept on again.

  “Ach, Gott!“came a hushed muttering. “This verdammt blackness—it would blind der deffil!”

  Emil Schorn came up the rope behind him, and followed along the ledge. They came to the little balcony of rusted metal. A gallows arm projected above it. A rope hung through an open trap door, and beneath it, swaying in the wind, white bones dangled in their chains.

  As Lanning tried the thin bone key in the metal door, the other men joined them, one by one, breathless, dripping shivering with cold—all save the Austrian, von Arneth.

  “Madre del Dios!” shuddered the Spanish flyer, Cresto. “He fell past me, screaming. He must have splashed, at 64 The Legion of Time

  the foot of the mountain! Cabron! And now we have one Maxim only.”

  The thick metal door slid suddenly aside, and a fetid breath came out of Sorainya’s dungeons. The reek of unwashed human misery, of human waste and human death, mingled with the suffocating acrid pungence of the anthropoid ants. Clenching his jaw against a fluttering of sickness in his stomach, Lanning led the raiders forward.