Beyond the Black Enigma

by Gardner Francis Fox

  He could not detect emotion in that telepathic voice, yet it was apparent that what he had done annoyed the sun-orb. Craig wondered if the thing had an Achilles heel. One thing he felt sure of; in these tightly packed corridors, Rhythane would not dare to unleash its full power by hurling a bolt of white energy at him. To do so meant it might destroy itself. Craig grinned wryly and walked faster along the great tunnels.

  Every time he came to a switch he threw it. Rhythane was silent. It spoke no more to his mind. Craig was aware that he might walk for days, maybe even years down here in these endless corridors, throwing switches, yet get nowhere. A Toparr could always be brought here to undo whatever damage he might cause.

  There had to be a better way. If he had The Imp—or even The Halo—there would be no problem. He could blast the sun-orb and it would be no more. But he had no weapon, other than his sword. And a sword could never defeat Rhythane.

  He circled back toward the sun-orb, throwing off switches as he came, feeling oddly helpless. One man against a god? He asked for miracles.

  Then he heard the sound of running footsteps. His heartbeat quickened. Ah! Toparrs were coming, to catch and destroy him. Feeling melodramatic, telling himself one sword would never be able to face a tarath, he yanked out his blade.

  To his surprise, no To appeared. Instead a man—one of the men who had been in the vast chamber far above his head—came sliding around a corner. He was clad in half-armor and he carried a sword himself, a rapier with a basket hilt that looked grimly dangerous to Craig, who was no Swordsman.

  The man might have stepped from the past, the major thought as he turned to face his attack. From the past of Rhythane, of course, though with a few alterations in his costume he might have been a Round-head of the time of Oliver Cromwell in England. Sword up, he came for the commander.

  Craig threw himself sideways, stabbed out. His point hit a curving breastplate and slid off, but the other sword had missed him as well. Craig leaped backward, slashing furiously, noting that his opponent took longer to turn and face him than was normal.

  So, then! Either Rhythane controlled the life in the man awkwardly and with hesitation, through disuse and long neglect, or the man himself was clumsy be cause he was so long unused to movement. It made no difference, really. Craig must strike while the opportunity was afforded him.

  He lunged savagely while his opponent was in the act of turning. He chose a chink in the armor—watched the point slide in between the tassets fastened below the breastplate on metal hinges. The man screamed—his mouth flew open and eyes bulged—as that steel went into him. Blood spurted and he collapsed.

  The breath labored in his lungs. He was dying as realistically as if he really were a human being. Had Rhythane been inside him, the god would have abandoned him instantly. Well, one puzzler had been solved. The men and women in the vast chamber above were alive; they were not mere androids controlled by Rhythane.

  The knowledge did him no good.

  Or—did it?

  Chapter Nine

  A thought lay dormant in his mind.

  Craig ran along the corridor, knowing that Rhythane would send more of the warrior-men waiting in the chamber of people, would send them in such numbers that he would have no chance to escape. They would hunt him down in these rabbit-warrens as terriers might hunt down a single rat in a maze, It would be only a matter of time.

  Time! How large a part it played in this entire assignment. The Then, the Now, the Beyond. Time permitted the original machine to gain a foothold on the people of the Rhydd, allowed them to become dependent on what their massive machine could do for them, so that they forgot the very knowledge they themselves had fed into its memory banks.

  Time had hidden this planet Rhythane from his first exploratory trip through the system of the Enigma, making him see it for the dead globe it would be millions of years in the far future. Encrusted with ice, a dead world, a world on which no life could possibly exist.

  Time! Right at this moment the Enigma was expanding outward, away from the planets and the sun inside its protective covering. In five years or ten or perhaps a hundred, it would be eating at one of the Empire planets, unless John Craig found a way to stop it.

  Time!

  If he had enough time, he might find a way to smash the sun-orb by shutting off its relay systems that went so deep and so far underground. If only there were more Time, he might learn how to destroy the Enigma, so that Empire might send troops to aid him.

  There was no time! In the distance he heard many feet pounding. Rhythane would have activated a greater number of the man-things from his storage chamber. Fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Enough, certainly, to corner and destroy him in one of these interminable corridors. Craig ran, dodging from one tunnel into another, drawing the pounding feet after him, deeper into the labyrinthine ways of this mechanical maze. He made sure his pursuers could hear him by letting his boots slap hard against the flooring. They were following his lead, all right—but what good did it do? Sooner or later, they would come to grips with him. The odds were too great!

  He slid against one of the relay banks, panting for breath. One man had no chance against so many, backed as they were by the might of a god. He was a fool to keep on fighting.

  One advantage alone was his. He was being called upon to fight only people, not Rhythane itself. If the god were opposing him actively, if it were using its telepathic powers to activate the humans, it would keep them still—search him out with its mind—and then send the humans like hunting hounds straight to their target.

  Instead, the humanoids must hunt him down, racing through these labyrinthine passageways, calling out to one another, alerting him to their presence. Craig ran easily, his body hard and lithe—on assignments, he was always trim—and his wits as cool as they ever were in moments of stress.

  Once at a distance, he saw a man garbed in the skins of the caveman era, running on naked feet with a gnarled club in his hand. Again he heard a clank in as a man in armor ran down a tunnel parallel with his own. After a little while, Craig kicked off his space-boots and left them behind; they were more dangerous because of the sound they made than they were worth at the moment.

  He rounded a corner, bumped into a bowman in a mail shirt. Craig pivoted on the toes of his left foot, rammed a left hook into his jaw. The man sagged and went down. Craig ran on.

  It seemed he was always running, now. No matter how good his physical condition, his muscles were tiring. And more and more of the humanoids were pouring into the corridor, hunting him down, closing the web of their weapons around him.

  He paused to lean against a bank of computer instruments, taking deep breaths. He could not hold out much longer. It had been touch and go for over an hour, perhaps even two hours of racing, dodging, slipping into side corridors and adjacent runways.

  As he straightened up to run again—

  “There he is!”

  The shout echoed from floor to ceiling, from bank filled wall to bank-filled wall. A human stood crouched, staring at him at the far end of the corridor. This human was clad in the gray battledress of the early atomic era. He held a rifle in his hands.

  The rifle came up, aiming. Craig thought, This is it. The end of the trail. My last assignment. In another second a bullet will rip into me and . . .

  Fool! Fool! Fool that I am!

  My means of escape is within hand-reach!

  His fingers dropped, caught the control dial of the Time warper and swung it. Through a blur he saw flame run from the barrel of the rifle at him. Involuntarily he ducked and realized that the man with his rifle was no longer in front of him. The corridor was empty.

  Time came to a standstill and he was in the present, in the Now. The humans were far beyond him in the future. Craig began his run along the corridor. It, would take time for Rhythane to find him. The sun-orb would have to search the years—how many of them Craig could not guess—and by that time he would have made his move.

  As he ran
he whipped off the warp-belt. This would be his weapon. When he turned on the warper, it created a gash in the space-time continuum. Inside the belt, a man was protected—but anything outside the belt—near enough to the warp to be affected by it—would be hit by the full cosmic fury of the warp.

  Even a god might be harmed by such a burst of power.

  He was unstrapping the belt as he came out onto the catwalk above the sun-orb. It was taken by surprise. It did not suspect his presence. It quivered a moment, readying a beam of power to hurl at him.

  At that moment, Craig acted.

  His fingers grip the warp control on his belt, swung it over hard—hard enough to break the miniaturized governor that held the warping powers of the belt in check. Without the governor, its warp would race on through Time like a rip in thin linen.

  Almost in that same motion he yanked free the belt and hurled it. The forces radiating outward from that specially treated length of leather almost overwhelmed him. It was as if a fist slammed into him—drove him backward in a reeling dance of helplessness—to send him crashing into a metal and glass computer bank.

  If the belt had not been flying outward over the sun-orb, its warp would have caught him in its grip. Craig shuddered, crouching there and staring as the twisting warp-belt flew outward above the sun-orb, strangely blurred due to the warping time-field surrounding it. For a few seconds, it seemed to hang there in space.

  Then it fell into the thing that called itself a god. Rhythane screamed, a silent, mindless shriek of anticipated destruction.

  No! You must not! You are destroying a god! The belt dropped into the orb. For an instant there was no reaction. Then the glowing brilliance of that which was Rhythane shuddered, convulsed in upon itself, as if it had been broken into a number of flowing streams of light that twisted and turned and writhed back toward an unseen source, and then flowed outward again. It was a thousand tornadoes linked together in turmoil. It was a river in spate, flowing back upon itself.

  It was energy linked with Time, swept up into a flow of years without beginning and without end. Craig was blinded by the brilliance of the orb, his arm came up to ward away that light before it seared his eyes. His back touched the bank of tubes and relays behind him, against which the catwalk fitted. They were warm to the touch, almost hot.

  Vaguely he realized that Rhythane was fighting the Time warp that had caught it up, with all its many powers. It seethed, it heaved, it struggled in the coils of cosmic momentum. It sought to fight Time itself and—it was a losing battle.

  Dimly, Craig understood that the warp-belt was building a flow of chronal power all about itself. Unchecked, with no hand to shut it off, its increasing energies were dragging the energy that was the sun-orb deeper into its matrix. It formed a helix of intermingled warp-Time and sun-orb, twisting upward into the future, yanking the heart of Rhythane from its housing outward into the chronal flow.

  Yes! The bulk of the sun orb was shrinking! It was growing smaller. Smaller! Now Craig could see wisps of the convulsed brilliance being dragged upward and disappearing like wisps of yellow smoke sucked into a vacuum.

  Through unguessable years the sun-orb was being lifted out of the Now-time and into the far distant future. The warp-belt, without its governor to control the length of warp-time, was in constant flux. It was plunging into eons piled on eons of eternity, dragging the sun-orb with it, carrying Rhythane the god to the very limits of time and space.

  At some point in the unknowable future, when all the stars were dead and the planets merely balls of ice, when no life survived anywhere in the cosmos, except perhaps as sheer energy, the warp-belt would plunge into normal space and time. With it would come the heart of Rhythane.

  Long would Rhythane glow and pulse, there at world's end.

  Its light would be the only light, its energy the only energy, its intelligence, the only intelligence. Alone, it would endure on that rim of forever, possessing neither its memories nor its knowledge—for those were far behind it, back where John Craig stood—but only its mindless life energy.

  In time, that too would be drained from it.

  And Rhythane the god would be no more. Craig sighed and turned away from the yawning pit that had been the home of the god. His ears hear only an empty silence. The relay circuits, the power conduits that connected Rhythane with its miles of computer banks, lay in broken dis-repair. The energy that had fueled them into pseudo-life was gone with the sun-orb, and they lay dead as any machinery will without a power source.

  The humanoids, too, were dead. Craig passed them as he walked out of the tunnel runways and moved toward the elevator shaft. Then he realized that the elevator would not work without the sun-orb and so he sought a ramp walk up which to trudge until he stood again in the garden of the metal shrubs and bushes.

  It was night, now. Craig lifted his eyes. The Enigma was gone with its creator. The stars were shining in a glory of pale blue fire all across the darkened sky down to the rim of the horizon. Craig felt his heart swell in his rib case. Those were the stars of empire, those suns. With their light they would bring the ships of Empire, too,

  Dan Ingalls. Elva Marlowe.

  Across the hundred thousand miles of space between him and the planet Rhyllan, his heart called out to Fiona. Little pagan! You have written your name in my heart. I will always love you, in my own fashion. Yet Fiona was not for John Craig.

  She would want to stay on Rhyllan, go back to her barbaric life and be a wife to him and raise his children. Understanding came to Craig that such a way of life was not his way of life. His place was out there—somewhere—anywhere—when danger threatened.

  Empire ships would know the Enigma was no more. They would come hunting the crewmen and John Craig. They would find John Craig alone on an otherwise empty planet. They would not take him to Rhyllan, but back to Revere planet, to make his report to Dan Ingalls.

  Word would go back to Rhyllan and to Fiona of the Rhydd that the John Craig she knew was dead; in a sense, this was true enough. He could never recapture those idyllic hours with Fiona. It was better this way; believing him dead, Fiona would make a new life for herself with some young Rhydd warrior.

  Craig sighed, walking through the metal gardens until he found a bench to sit upon and begin his lonely vigil until a ship should come to take him to Alert Command headquarters.

  Above him the stars gleamed brightly, as they had not done on the planet Rhythane for twenty thousand years.

  END

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