The Overlords of War

by Gerard Klein

  "Something’s going to happen. I can tell. But it won’t come clear yet.”

  And, as he stretched out his hand to turn on a light: “No, better not alert them!”

  She was showing more presence of mind than he was. He threw back his coverlet, set his feet on the ground, and in the course of the movement brushed against her. She caught at him. He clutched her to him and felt her lips move against his ear.

  Before he had time to catch one word of what she was saying, there was uproar in the camp. Men ran and shouted oaths to the accompaniment of a rattle of gunfire. A motor began to wheeze. A shrill vibration ripped the air. Artillery snarled and burped. Officers shouting orders sought to call their men to stations. Searchlights stabbed the sides of the tent, but they were in quest of another target and did not pause. Above the cries and the clanging of metal on metal Corson clearly made out the sobs of frightened pegasones.

  Frightened? But in the wild no Monster—

  The lamps went out. The shadows which had been moving on the walls of the tent gave way to total shadow, menacing. The racket changed its nature. Sounds became muffled. The guns grew quiet. Someone stumbled and fell groaning against the tent, whose guys held good, and then made off on dragging feet.

  In the silence which followed, he recognized the voice of Veran, much amplified.

  “Corson, are you there? If this is one of your tricks... I”

  The rest was lost. Corson hesitated. Not knowing what was going on, he had no reason to make things worse between himself and Veran. He almost called back, but Antonella put her hand over his mouth.

  “Someone’s coming!”

  When he lost sight of her in the sudden dark, he had not been particularly alarmed. Now that his eyes had had time to adjust, though, he realized that this was no ordinary night. They were adrift in the same opaque fog as when they had been taken prisoner. Something was blotting up light.

  So the camp was under attack. The onslaught had lasted less than three minutes and already it was over. No one could fight in murk like this. And even if Veran knew how to generate it, he apparently didn’t know how to counteract it.

  “You mean Veran?” he whispered, harking back to Antonella’s precognition.

  “No, not him. Nobody from the camp. Someone”—she tensed, pressing close against him—"someone like you. Someone very much like you!”

  One of the attackers, then—a liberator, or a new threat?

  There was a draft. Someone had lifted the flap of the tent. A spot of light appeared close to Corson’s face. It grew larger, swirled, sucked in wreaths of the dense fog. Soon Corson could see his own hands on Antonella’s shoulders. The luminous area resembled a galaxy spinning on its axis in free space, and deforming and tearing the space as it expanded. When the zone was two meters across it stabilized and ceased to revolve. Antonella and Corson found themselves almost completely within a cocoon of brilliance, roughly spherical and walled with night.

  Antonella stifled a cry.

  A gloved hand emerged from the mist. It floated in midair as though it had been severed from its arm. It was empty. Palm forward, it made a universal gesture of peaceful intention: I hold no weapon!

  And there was, after all, a man behind that open hand. Or at any rate a humanoid form in a space suit. The visor was full of darkness.

  Without a word the visitor offered Corson two suits identical to his own and indicated by signs that he and Antonella should put them on.

  Corson broke the silence. “Who the hell are you?”

  The unknown pointed with greater insistence at the suits Corson was so slow to take hold of. Antonella seized one and started to draw it on.

  “Not so fast," Corson said. “We have no reason to trust this man!”

  “He’s going to get us out of here,” she answered. “Get us out of the camp.”

  “How?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. He’s going to use a method I can’t grasp.”

  Corson made up his mind, peeled off his festive garments, and slipped into the suit. He set the helmet in place and was surprised at being able to hear as well as before. He exchanged a few words with Antonella. So there was no technical reason for the stranger to remain dumb. But why space suits? Did this obscuring mist have a toxic effect after long exposure?

  The stranger checked the seal on Antonella’s suit, then turned to Corson. He jerked his head, indicating the engulfing mist, and took Antonella by the hand. She caught on at once and offered her other hand to Corson. They plunged together into total blackness.

  The stranger led them along with confidence. Carefully he avoided obstacles and made sure his companions did the same. Several times Corson felt soldiers brush against him, wandering around the camp in utter confusion. Once someone clutched desperately at him. He struck out reflexively with his free hand and the attacker doubled over with a gasp.

  The darkness had imposed quiet. Here and there a few calls could still be heard, but it seemed that the soldiers, dazed, had given up hope of locating each other except by groping their way. Perhaps, too, they were afraid of attracting the blows of unseen enemies. Even the officers had stopped issuing orders. Only the pegasones continued to wail. Their sobbing reminded Corson unpleasantly of his first night on Uria.

  And the sobs grew louder. The stranger was leading them toward the pegasone park. Corson hesitated, but Antonella’s hand drew him onward. He was angry with himself for his own misgivings, because she seemed unaffected by them. On the other hand, she had never seen Monsters at work . . .

  Finally they came to a halt. Close to them, the stranger busied himself with some unknown task. Corson guessed that he must be saddling up a pegasone. So that was the way of escape he had picked for them. It was terribly risky, in Corson’s view.

  Now the mystery man produced a little glowing ball and Corson could see his guess had been correct. Complex harness hung from the beast’s flank. What corresponded to a saddle for its riders was no more than a kind of swing fitted with stirrups. There were straps to fasten yourself on by.

  Corson had scarcely mounted before he felt the fearful tendrils of the pegasone curl around his wrists. He expected the worst. But the pressure remained gentle. Those strands which could cut like steel wires did not even hamper his movements. He guessed that they must serve as reins for the rider. But he had not the slightest idea how one controlled a pegasone.

  The Monster—as he still thought of it despite his best efforts to the contrary—trembled with excitement. It had stopped whining and now was giving forth an irregular series of whistles. Raising his head, Corson could just make out three of its eyes.

  He heard the stranger utter a peculiar cry, braced for a shock, and— against all expectation—found himself falling. He was weightless. If he had not felt the straps floating around him and the massive body of the pegasone against his side, he would have believed that a pit had opened under his feet. Antonella gasped in surprise. He wanted to comfort her, but before he had time to frame the words, they emerged from darkness.

  Above them stars shone peacefully. Corson craned his neck, but the vast bulk of the beast hid Antonella from him.

  Then he saw something which took his breath away: another pegasone, like a giant mushroom turning in the air, occulting a vast area of the sky, its eyes flashing as wildly as the lamps on an insane computer. The stranger hung on its flank like a wart. He waved encouragement to them.

  Then Corson dared to look downward, expecting to see a pool of opaque fog. But in the weak starlight all he could make out was the ground in the clearing. A breeze was bowing many tall plants where, a few hours earlier, he had seen nothing but ashes. The camp seemed never to have existed.

  So they had made a jump through time. The pegasone was capable of motion not merely in space but far further across time than the wild Monster Corson was acquainted with. How far, he couldn’t guess; they might have gone back a night, a week, a century before Veran or even Corson reached Uria.


  It occurred to him to invoke Antonella’s talent. He called out, "What’s going to happen next?”

  She answered uncertainly. “I don’t know. I can’t cog anything at all.”

  Suddenly they went up like a rocket. The clearing disappeared in the black fleece of the forest. Now Corson realized the purpose of the space suits. At this rate they would be out of atmosphere in a few minutes.

  A smear crossed the sky, hiding the stars for a fraction of a second. Then another. Then the two fleeing pegasones were high enough for the sun to be seen over the eastern rim of the planet. They raced beneath a sky that grew blacker and blacker while, below, Uria was a huge bowl of shadow, crested on one side with a diadem of fire.

  Inexpressible jubilation overcame Corson’s mind.

  Once more, a dark smear on the sky. Although the vision lasted only an instant, this time he recognized it. A pegasone, no doubt one of Veran’s. The colonel hadn’t lost any time. No, that phrase didn’t mean anything. Since the pegasones were capable of time-jumping, Veran could have taken as long as he liked to prepare for the chase. He might have organized an ambush. These pegasones rushing by were no more than scouts beating the past and future in search of the quarry.

  Suddenly: a scrimmage. They were in the middle of a sphere of pegasones. The sun stared Corson in the face and he shut his eyes. It had crossed the sky in one gigantic bound. He understood why. To escape the snare, the stranger had dodged through time. For a moment they played this weird game with Veran’s cavalry on a chessboard of meters and seconds. But the outcome seemed scarcely to be in doubt. Each time they found themselves in the middle of a smaller sphere. Despite vacuum and great distance Corson fancied he could hear the soldiers’ shouts of triumph. The sun danced in the sky as though it had been turned into a bouncing ball. Was it below, to the side, or where? The planet Uria flickered between the brilliance of day and the obliteration of night.

  Corson saw the other pegasone, the stranger’s, coming dangerously close. He uttered a cry of warning. Antonella echoed him. The stranger leaned over and seized a handful of the tendrils on their steed. And the universe changed shape and color. Everything they knew disappeared.

  The space around them was streaked with colored flames. The stars had vanished, and the planet too. The pegasone’s body loomed blood-red. As for the flames, they clashed and intertwined in great sheaves of luminance, but the space they wove back and forth in had no depth. Corson could not have said whether those flames were a few millimeters from his eyes, or light-years distant.

  Maybe this was the real appearance of the universe. It was another aspect of it, anyway. The pegasones were moving through time at high velocity, he was sure of that. Which turned perspective topsyturvy. The regular image human beings had of the cosmos was essentially static. For them, stars moved only slowly in the heavens. The release of energy which gave them birth, then consumed them until nothing was left but a few cinders of inert and unbelievably dense matter, was far too slow for a man to perceive under normal circumstances. The greater part of the important events in the history of the universe did not affect him, for he was unaware of them. He could discern only a narrow band of the radiations permeating all of space. He could, live under the illusion that the cosmos is mainly composed of vacuum, of nothingness, that the stars—few and far between —are like a tenuous gas, a trifle more concentrated in the vicinity of a galaxy.

  But in reality the universe was full. No point existed in space

  which did not at some given moment of time correspond to a particle, to a photon, to some manifestation of the primal energies. In a sense, the universe was solid. A supposititious observer looking at it from outside would not have found a way to stick a pin into it. And because the pegasones were moving so rapidly through time, their riders saw the universe as dense. If they reached Ultimate Velocity, Corson said to himself, if they found themselves present at the beginning and the end of the universe and at every instant between, they would purely and simply be squashed.

  At the rate they were traveling, light vibrations were invisible. But those blue flames might be electromagnetic waves several light-years long, and those purple rays might correspond to variations in the gravitational field of the stars or of the galaxies themselves. They were literally crossing time at a gallop. And just as a rider on a horse going full tilt does not notice the stones on the roadway, but only the major items alongside it such as hills or trees, only the chief events of the universe were perceptible to them.

  Now Corson’s thoughts took a different turn. He had been mistaken in assuming that Veran must have a starship. He and his men must have fled the scene of battle on steeds like this. They had just arrived when he and Antonella fell among them. Aergistal, then, might easily be at the other end of the universe.

  The whirling of the flames diminished. They were slowing down. The luminous space around them split up into a horde of separate patches, which shrank as empty blackness gobbled them up, like the progression of a fatal disease. Soon they were surrounded only by bright points. Stars. Among them one alone remained two-dimensional, a disc of gold. A sun. They were spinning around and around. When the heavens ceased to revolve they found themselves once again above the cloud-enshrouded ball of a planet.

  Not till then did Corson realize that the second pegasone had vanished. They had escaped their pursuers but they had lost their guide. They were alone above an unknown world, bound to a steed they had no idea how to control,

  Antonella recovered enough breath to ask: “Uria?"

  “No,” Corson replied. “This planet is farther from its sun. The constellations aren’t the same here, either. We’ve traveled in space as well.”

  The pegasone was going down, unhesitatingly, as though it knew its way, and shortly they were enveloped in cloud. A little lower, they passed through a belt of fine rain.

  The rain stopped. They pierced through the clouds as though through a ceiling and discovered a plain of mown grass that seemed to go on for ever. A roadway glistening with rain striped across it. It began beyond the horizon and led to a colossal building: a parallelopiped of stone or concrete whose top was lost in mist. No trace of windows. Corson guessed that its narrowest face must be more than a kilometer along the base. It was bare, smooth, and gray.

  The pegasone landed. Corson unhitched his straps. He went around the beast and helped Antonella to clamber down. Apparently satisfied, the pegasone started to graze with its tendrils, swallowing the grass in noisy gulps.

  That grass was as neat as a lawn. The plain was so flat, indeed, that it seemed to Corson out of the question for it to be other than artificial. The roadway was of some brilliant blue substance. A kilometer away at most, the building reared up like a dizzying cliff.

  “Ever seen this place before?” he asked.

  Antonella shook her head.

  “Does the layout suggest anything to you?” he pressed. “This plain, this grass, that building?”

  Since she did not answer, he asked on the spur of the moment, “Well, then, what’s going to happen right now?”

  “We’re going to the building. We’ll enter it. Up to then we won’t see anybody. Afterward, I don’t know.”

  “There’s no danger?”

  “None that I can cog.”

  He stared at her. “Antonella, what do you make of all this?”

  “I’m with you. That will do for the time being.”

  He nearly snapped at her with annoyance, but controlled himself, and merely said, “Okay, let’s go!”

  He started off with long strides, and she almost had to run to keep level with him. After a moment he regretted his anger and slowed down. Antonella was probably his only ally in the universe. Maybe that was why her company upset him.

  The roadway ended at the foot of a huge door, hermetically sealed and matching the scale of the building, which practically merged with the wall. But when they arrived in front of it, it slid soundlessly upward. Corson strained his ears for any noise
from within, but heard nothing. The whole setup made him think of a mousetrap.

  For giant mice.

  “If we go in, will the door shut behind us?”

  Antonella closed her eyes.

  “Yes. But nothing will threaten us inside, at least not for the first few minutes.”

  They crossed the threshold. The door started to come down again. Corson stepped back. The door stopped, then rose again, indicating a simple automatic detector. He was much relieved. He had no special wish to explore the building without knowing more about it, but they could hardly stand around forever on that lawn. Sooner or later they would get hungry, and they couldn’t eat grass. And eventually night would fall. It might be cold; it might be inhabited by enemies. They had to find shelter. Above all they had to abide by that oldest of all the military principles embodied in the Briefings: keep on the move, never stay put, try to take the enemy by surprise . . .

  Not that it was so easy to surprise an opponent when you knew nothing about him.

  Their eyes adjusted to the gloom in here. On both sides of an aisle which extended out of sight down a vast hall, geometrically exact structures reared up like the webs of a mathematically inclined spider, forming cells like those of a honeycomb. Those too continued to infinity, lost at last in a bluish mist.

  The nearest cell contained ten girls’ bodies, completely nude, and shrouded by a faintly violet gas that stayed put although nothing seemed to be confining it. Motionless, as rigid as corpses, they were all very beautiful and might be aged eighteen to twenty-five. They bore a vague family resemblance to one another. Drawing a deep breath, Corson made a rough estimate: if every cell was filled the same way, then even in the small section of this monstrous hall that he could make guesses about there must be a good million bodies.

  Close to his cheek, Antonella whispered, “Are they dead?”

  He reached out. His hand penetrated the mist without meeting any resistance, but he felt his skin tingle. Maybe the gas had preservative properties. He touched a warm soft shoulder. It felt no colder than twenty degrees C. In one sense, then, it might be said she was still alive. Gently he took hold of her wrist. The pulse was nearly imperceptible. The heart seemed to be beating, but only at a very slow tempo.