[Jan Darzek 05] - The Whirligig of Time

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  "Yes," Qwasrolk said. He gestured. "There."

  "Since we can't break through the wall, and since we can't travel the way you do -"

  Qwasrolk had vanished.

  "I think he's trying to help us," Darzek said. "But what can he do now?"

  No one answered.

  "The error thing is his idee fixe. Once we showed an interest in that, he was no longer apprehensive about us. We were on his side. Strange."

  "The poor, pathetic creature," Miss Schlupe murmured. "If you'd been through what he's been through, you'd have an idee fixe, too."

  "Mine would be to idee fixe the person responsible. Do you think I should go back and try to get help?"

  "Wait," Miss Schlupe said. "Qwasrolk knows where we are, and he thinks we're on his side, and he really must want to show us something or he wouldn't have led us here. Maybe there's machinery in the laboratory, and he can punch a hole in the wall from the other side. Let's see what he does next."

  "If he doesn't die first. He may, you know. Any minute."

  "He acted lively enough," Miss Schlupe said. "Having a job to do seems to have revived him."

  "Very well," Darzek said. "We'll sit here and see what happens." They hadn't long to wait. Qwasrolk appeared suddenly, carrying a transmitter frame. He set it down, moved it about to find a level surface it could stand upright on, and vanished again. Darzek strolled over to examine it.

  It was new, with the control still sealed. "He stole this!" Darzek exclaimed.

  "What would he pay for it with?" Miss Schlupe asked. "His solvency credential was burned away."

  "This would fascinate students of parapsychology. It's possible to teleport with freight. We should have thought of that - remember all the stuff he'd accumulated in the grove? Strange that he should steal, though. In this society, theft -"

  "Idee fixe," Miss Schlupe said. "Turn the thing on. Has he gone to get the other one, or did he steal them both at once?"

  The transmitter was the simplest model made. It was matched only to its mate, and it operated over a limited distance. Such models were in great demand for use in factories or multiple-storied buildings where there was a great deal of traffic between two specific points.

  Darzek turned it on. There was no answering light, so the mate was not operating.

  Then the signal flashed and Qwasrolk stepped through the transmitter frame. "Come," he said.

  He turned, walked back through the frame, vanished. Darzek and Miss Schlupe exchanged glances. Then Darzek stepped to the frame and followed.

  He emerged in a long room formed by the two walls across the tunnel. Here the tunnel was in excellent repair. The walls had been refinished with white mortar over the stones. The floor had been rebuilt expertly with inlaid flat stones. The ceiling was luminous like those in the markets. Darzek was momentarily blinded by the bright light.

  He kept walking, conscious of the fact that Miss Schlupe and her commandos were stepping through the transmitter after him. He heard an increasing volume of footsteps on the stone floor, but he did not look back. Neither did he look at Qwasrolk, who was walking a short distance ahead of him.

  In the center of the room, extending from floor almost to the ceiling, was an enormous, pear-shaped object. The lower section could have been a huge, oddly designed generator. The humped top bristled with strangely shaped protrusions, like an insect with a multitude of mutated antennae. It even looked menacing.

  At the side of the room were workbenches with banks of instruments and controls. Wolndur hurried ahead of Darzek, walked in a circle around the looming structure, and then unerringly followed a cable to one of the instrument panels.

  "This must control it," he said. "The others will be test panels.

  With anything this complicated, a multitude of things can go wrong. Each functioning component would have to be tested before anyone could be certain that it would work."

  "Is there a timer?" Darzek asked.

  "I don't see one. It could be built into the mechanism." "Can you make the thing harmless without setting it off?"

  "Easily." Wolndur went to one of the workbenches and returned with a set of peculiar-looking tools. Darzek remembered what he'd thought about theoretical physicists and made a mental apology. Wolndur wouldn't know anything about knocking down walls, but he could tackle a complicated enormity, like this with ease.

  Miss Schlupe spoke up. "If you're going to fuss with this thing, shouldn't I send my commandos back through the transmitter?"

  "If this goes off," Darzek said dryly, "it won't matter which side of the wall they're standing on. And we may need them. Once Wolndur starts dismantling it - and that's what I want him to do, first make sure it's turned off, and then disassemble as much as he can as fast as possible - it may send out a signal. If it does, someone may come to see what's happening."

  He pointed to a transmitter frame that stood at the far end of the room. It obviously was a design that provided the ultimate in security. "It may be personalized," Darzek said, "but I don't know why anyone would bother. It's people getting in here that he'd worry about, not people getting out, and personalization on both ends would be a nuisance. Later, we'll try it and see - but not until this gadget is taken care of. So I think your commandos had better stay. You can arrange them on either side of the transmitter, but out of sight. That way they can grab off any visitors one at a time, as they arrive, which is much neater than waiting until they look the situation over and decide to leave."

  "Agreed," Miss Schlupe said. She led her commandos over to the distant transmitter frame and gave them her instructions. Wolndur was still studying the monstrous pear-shaped edifice when she returned. Darzek and Melris were watching him. Qwasrolk, now that others had assumed responsibility for the error, the idea fixe that had haunted him, seemed to have lost interest. He had slumped to the floor in exhaustion, leaning against the wall with his arm across his face to shield his eyes.

  Wolndur went to have a look at the control panel. He called Melris and spoke tersely to her for a moment before he pushed a low platform up to the menacing structure. The platform moved on rollers, and when he got it positioned, he locked them. He stepped onto it, and the top of the platform rose slowly, carrying him toward the roof. Finally he stopped his ascent and reached out to snap off a large plate. Then, for a long, tense moment, he peered through the opening with a handlight.

  "All right," he announced suddenly. "I think I see the main solenoid, and I'll remove it first. Then I'll take out everything else I can reach."

  "Will that make it safe?" Darzek asked.

  "Maybe not to us. This thing undoubtedly contains an enormous amount of radioactive material, and I have no idea how well it's shielded. But it can't go off with the control assembly removed. At least, it shouldn't."

  "Go ahead," Darzek said. "Toss down the parts as fast as you can get them out, and I'll stomp them into unrecognizable junk. At the very least, we can make certain that a lot of replacements have to be ordered before the thing can be used."

  Wolndur began to apply his tools. For a time there was an occasional clinking. Then he tossed down a strange-looking coil. Darzek flattened it with one stomp. He did the same with the next part. The third was large and heavy and enclosed in an oblong shield. Darzek carried it over to one of the workbenches, found a tool that looked something like a massive wrench, and pounded the object into unrecognizability.

  While he was working on it, Miss Schlupe crushed several delicately constructed items that Wolndur dropped to her. When Darzek returned, Wolndur paused and looked down doubtfully. "Maybe we're doing the wrong thing. We're destroying scientific knowledge."

  "This knowledge," Darzek said firmly, "is best buried right here," Wolndur threw down more parts. Some of them obviously contained intricate electrical pathways and represented fantastically complex custom designing. When Darzek could not smash them with his foot, he took them to a bench and used a tool.

  Final
ly Wolndur called, "Melris?"

  Melris, still at the control panel, threw a switch. A few yellow lights came on; most of the panels remained dark. "Got most of the circuits," Wolndur said with satisfaction and went back to work.

  Miss Schlupe's commandos were finding the whole procedure perplexing. The deliberate destruction of property was both comic and tragic to Vezpronian psychology. They regarded Darzek's antics as acts of puzzling hilarity. Eventually all of them were watching him, and the figure that suddenly stepped from the transmitter they surrounded took them by surprise.

  It was Naz Forlan.

  He strode into the room, taking several steps before he noticed the small army of commandos clustered about him. That brought him to an abrupt and bewildered halt. Then his expression changed to amazement as he recognized Darzek, recognized Melris Angoz, recognized Miss Schlupe, and finally lifted his gaze from the debris that littered the floor to Wolndur, still working near the ceiling. Wolndur had not seen him enter, and he casually tossed down one more complicated element from the innards he was probing.

  No one touched Forlan. He arrived, he took his steps into the room, he looked about, he finally grasped what was happening, and he spun around and leaped for the transmitter. And Miss Schlupe's commandos were still too surprised to react.

  But as Forlan's foot started the final step that would take him to safety, Qwasrolk stood beside him and gripped him firmly. Forlan struggled, but the mutilated creature's strength was irresistible.

  "I've been looking for you," he said, elation in his voice. "It's the same experiment, and it has the same error. It doesn't work like you said it would, and the last time I didn't know what to do. I want to show you where the error is. It must be corrected, or what happened on Nifron D will happen here. If you'll let me explain -"

  Forlan said nothing. He continued to struggle.

  Then Qwasrolk was gone. So was Forlan, and all of them, including the commandos who had been poised to capture anyone who came through the transmitter, stood staring at emptiness.

  24

  As Darzek had deduced, the exit transmitter was not personalized.

  He waited until Wolndur assured him that the entire activating apparatus of the nuclear monster would have to be rebuilt before it could harm anyone. Then, after telling him to carryon, he took Miss Schlupe aside for a conference.

  The result was that a squad of Miss Schlupe's commandos returned to the tunnel by way of Qwasrolk's stolen transmitter frames. They would carry one of the frames along the tunnel to the limit of its range, leave a guard with it, and return to Klinoz by way of the underground shopping center with a message for the masfiln.

  Darzek, because he did not know what he would find on the other end, took two squads of commandos with him to investigate Naz Forlan's transmitter. He knew that the trip would be one-way, because the matched transmitter they emerged from would certainly be personalized. He told Miss Schlupe to guard the place well, be alert in case Forlan returned with an army, and let no one else use the transmitter until she heard from him.

  Signaling his commandos to follow at regular intervals, he turned and stepped through. He emerged in darkness, reached forward blindly, found a door, opened it.

  The transmitter frame had been concealed in one of several small storage rooms adjacent to a long, bare room that looked like a primitive scientific research laboratory. As he expected, it was personalized. And it had two destination settings.

  The laboratory proved to be an annex to a rustic-looking country dwelling. The commandos quickly secured the place, and it took Darzek only a few minutes to confirm that the dwelling belonged to Naz Forlan. Finding out where it was would take him considerably longer.

  There was no road. There were no other habitations in sight. Darzek went back inside the dwelling and thoughtfully considered the destination board on the transmitter that stood in a small foyer. He probably could step through it to any address he knew on the world of Vezpro, or even to the transfer stations; but it certainly would be personalized for arrivals, so he could not return and he still would have no notion of where he had been.

  He discussed the problem with his commandos. Finally he sent six of them, with the same message for the masfiln, through the transmitter to their own headquarters. One of them was to return immediately if she could. She did not, which confirmed that the transmitter was personalized. Darzek resignedly chose another six to accompany him, told those left behind to guard the place well, and started off in search of someone who could tell him where he was.

  He chose a route that led toward a distant hill, and they struggled across the tangled landscape for kilometers before they made the perspiring ascent and looked down on a small, typically Vezpronian town -a single sprawling building with a central park. Descending the hill they broke into a run, and they dashed panting along a tunneled street oblivious to the stares of passersby.

  They used the first public transmitter they came to, and moments later Darzek was in Klinoz, in the government complex, being embraced by the masfiln.

  "I have done everything you asked," Min Kallof said. "Is it really over? And was it really Naz Forlan?"

  "It must have been." "I can't believe it."

  "As to whether it's over, he has at least one other secret laboratory, and there may be more. We can't be certain that there's only one nuclear gadget until we've searched all of them. I need six of the best transmitter technicians available. At once."

  Miss Schlupe's commandos already had established a transmitter link with the underground lab they'd discovered. Wolndur had nuclear specialists in protective clothing completing the disassembly of Forlan's device and carefully encasing radioactive material in shielded containers. Miss Schlupe, finally exhausted by the long trek through the tunnel and the excitement that followed, had gone home for a nap. Darzek sent Melris with a message to tell her what he'd found.

  Darzek's continuous exertions now had overlapped two days, and he felt exhausted. When he stepped through the laboratory transmitter to Naz Forlan's country estate a second time, he was wondering whether Forlan's storage rooms contained anything resembling food. The six transmitter technicians trailed after him.

  Three of them went to work on the transmitter in the foyer, and the other three concentrated on the one in the laboratory, first moving the frame out of the storage room so they could have access to it.

  Forlan had engineered the personalizing himself, with a system of his own devising that completely befuddled them. Those working in the dwelling succeeded first, and the place soon was crowded with more technicians, with scientists, with government officials, and with the new chief proctor, who thought that he should take charge. Disgusted, Darzek chased out all except those he had a use for.

  The technicians working in the laboratory had a much more difficult task. The transmitter was an unfamiliar model Forlan had imported or built himself. Hours passed. Another shift of technicians took over, with the same lack of success. Min Kallof came to see if they were making progress and anxiously reminded Darzek of the date. Darzek was unable to reassure him. Miss Schlupe arrived, with Melris and Wolndur, irritated because Darzek's order to keep people away had been so strictly enforced that she'd had to appeal to the masfiln in order to find him.

  She looked sternly at Darzek and asked, "Do you know how long it's been since you slept? You should see yourself."

  "No, thank you." Darzek said. "I'll wait. I think they're getting it." They were. A technician heaved a sigh, stepped back, turned on the transmitter, and got an acceptance light. Darzek stepped through right behind him, and they found themselves in the walled-off tunnel Qwasrolk had led them to. The nuclear specialists were still at work, but Forlan's capacious monster was now almost empty.

  Darzek and the technician exchanged shrugs. "Wrong guess," Darzek said philosophically. "Now you can try the other setting."

  Having solved the problem once, it did not take the technicians long to solve it a s
econd time. Darzek followed one of them through the transmitter and emerged in another section of walled-off tunnel. This was much longer than the other and was equipped as a complex research laboratory where many scientists could work and live together. Probably the components of Forlan's nuclear devices had been built here.

  And here a strange and terrible drama had been enacted.

  Qwasrolk, intent on demonstrating the "error" that had caused the Nifron D tragedy and was about to cause another, had started a diagram on one of Forlan's workscreens. Forlan had tried to escape to the transmitter, but Qwasrolk - who could block any dash Forlan made by teleporting himself - had seized Forlan and dragged him back. The scuff marks and twin lines left by Forlan's feet after each escape attempt told their own eloquent story. Eventually Forlan must have tried to attack Qwasrolk physically, and the maimed creature had reacted with rage.

  Forlan lay near the transmitter, strangled.

  Qwasrolk lay before the computer screen. After killing Forlan, he had returned to his diagram, his mind still intent on demonstrating the error he thought his employer had made. His weakened condition and his sustained exertion had finally completed his tortuous process of dying.

  Darzek left the technician by the transmitter while he made a careful inspection of the laboratory. Then, carefully avoiding the bodies, he returned to the transmitter. The search would have to continue, but he was convinced, now, that there were no more secret laboratories. And no more nuclear devices.

  "What do we do next?" the technician asked.

  "We go home," Darzek answered. "Our work - both yours and mine - is finished."

  Min Kallof had only one word. "Why?" "Wolndur and Melris can tell you," Darzek said.

  Wolndur said sadly, "He was an alien, and Vezpro treated him like one."

  "But we made his people welcome here!" the masfiln protested.

  "They had every opportunity available to natives. Forlan became the most wealthy and successful scientist on the planet!"