Earth's Last Fortress

by A. E. van Vogt

  He did so, smiling. The door squealed slightly as it opened. When he closed it, it creaked, and the automatic lock clicked loudly. There had been no such sound. Norma felt the deepening whiteness in her cheeks. Chilled, she asked, “What is this machine?”

  “Owned by the local electric company, I believe,” he answered suavely, and his voice mocked her. “We just have permission to use the room, of course.”

  “That’s not possible,” she said thickly. “Electrical companies don’t have machines in the back rooms of shabby buildings.”

  He shrugged. “Really,” he said indifferently, “this is beginning to bore me. I have already seen some of its powers, yet your mind persists in being practical after a twentieth-century fashion. I will repeat merely that you are a slave of the machine, and that it will do no good to go to the police, entirely aside from the fact that I saved you from suicide by drowning, and gratitude alone should make you realize that you owe everything to me, and nothing to the world you were prepared to desert. However, that is too much to expect. You will learn by experience.”

  Quite calmly, Norma walked across the room. She opened the door, and then, startled that he had made no move to stop her, turned to stare at him. He was still standing there, and he was smiling.

  “You must be quite mad,” she said after a moment. “Perhaps you had some idea that your little trick, whatever it was, would put the fear of the unknown into me. Let me dispel that right now. I’m going to the police this very minute.”

  The picture that remained in her mind as she climbed aboard the bus was of him standing there, tall and casual and terrible in his contemptuous derision. The chill of that memory slowly mutilated the steady tenor of her forced calm.

  3

  The sense of nightmare vanished as she climbed off the streetcar in front of the imposing police building. Sunshine splashed vigorously on the pavement, cars honked. The life of the city swirled lustily around her, and brought a wave of returning confidence.

  The answer, now that she thought of it, was simplicity itself. Hypnotism! That was what had made her see a great, black, unused engine burst into mysterious flames. Tingling with anger at the way she had been tricked, she lifted her foot to step on the curb.

  The foot, instead of lifting springily, dragged. Her muscles almost refused to carry the weight. She grew aware of a man less than a dozen feet from her, staring at her with popping eyes.

  “Good heavens!” he gasped audibly. “I must be seeing things.”

  He walked off rapidly, and the part of her thoughts that registered his odd actions tucked them away. She felt too weary, mentally and physically, even for curiosity. With faltering steps she moved across the sidewalk. It was as if something was tearing at her strength, holding her with invisible but immense forces. The machine! she thought, and panic blazed through her.

  Will power kept .her going. She reached the top of the steps and approached the big doors. It was then the first sick fear came that she couldn’t make it; and as she strained feebly against the hard resistance of the door, the fever of dismay grew hot and terrible inside her. What had happened to her? How could a machine reach out over a distance and strike unerringly at one particular individual with such enormous devitalizing power?

  A shadow leaned over her. The booming voice of a policeman who had just come up the steps was the most heartening sound she’d ever heard. “Too much for you, eh, madam? Here, I’ll push that door for you.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and her voice sounded so weak and unnatural in her own ears that a new terror flared. In a few minutes she wouldn’t be able to speak above a whisper.

  “A slave of the machine,” he had said, and she knew with a clear and burning logic that if she was ever to conquer, it was now. She must get into this building. She must see someone in authority, and she must tell him…must…must…Somehow, she pumped strength into her brain and courage into her heart and forced her legs to carry her across the threshold into the big modern building with its mirrored anteroom and its fine marble corridors. Inside, she knew suddenly that she had reached her limit. She stood there on the hard floor and felt her whole body shaking from the enormous effort it took simply to stay erect. Her knees felt dissolved and cold, like ice turning to liquid. She grew aware that the big policeman was hovering uncertainly beside her.

  “Anything I can do, mother?” he asked heartily.

  Mother! she echoed mentally with a queer sense of insanity. Her mind skittered off after the word. Did he really say that, or had she dreamed it? Why, she wasn’t a mother. She wasn’t even married.

  She fought the thought off. She’d have to pull herself together, or there was madness here. No chance now of getting to an inspector or an officer. The big constable must be her confidant, her hope to defeat the mighty power that was striking at her across miles of city, an incredibly evil, terrible power whose ultimate purpose she could not begin to imagine. She parted her lips to speak, and it was then she saw the mirror.

  She saw a tall, thin, old, old woman standing beside the fresh-cheeked bulk of a blue-garbed policeman. It was such an abnormal trick of vision that it fascinated her. In some way, the mirror was missing her image and reflecting instead the form of an old woman who must be close behind and slightly to one side of her. She half-lifted her red-gloved hand toward the policeman to draw his attention to the distortion. Simultaneously, the red-gloved hand of the old woman in the mirror reached toward the policeman. Her own raised hand stiffened in midair; so did the hand of the old woman. Puzzled, she drew her gaze from the mirror and stared blankly at that rigidly uplifted hand. A tiny bit of wrist was visible between her glove and the sleeve of her woolen suit. Her skin wasn’t really so dark as that!

  Two things happened then. A tall man came softly through the door—Dr. Lell—and the big policeman’s hand touched her shoulder.

  “Really, madam, at your age, you shouldn’t come here. A phone call would serve.”

  And Dr. Lell was saying, “My poor old grandmother—”

  Their voices went on, but the sense of them jangled in her brain as she jerked frantically to pull the glove off a hand wrinkled and shriveled by age. Blackness, pierced with agonized splinters of light, reached mercifully into her brain. Her very last thought was that it must have happened just before she stepped onto the curb, when the man had stared at her pop-eyed and thought himself crazy. He must have seen the change taking place.

  The pain faded; the blackness turned gray, then white. She was conscious of a car engine purring, and of forward movement. She opened her eyes—and her brain reeled from a surge of awful memory.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Dr. Lell, and his voice was as soothing and gentle as it had been hard and satirical at the recruiting station. “You are again yourself. In fact, you are approximately ten years younger.”

  He removed one hand from the steering wheel and flashed a mirror before her eyes. The brief glimpse she had of her image made her grab at the silvered glass as if it were the most precious thing in all the world.

  One long hungry look she took. And then her arm, holding the mirror, collapsed to the seat. Tears sticky on her cheeks, weak and sick from reaction, she lay back against the cushions. At last she said steadily, “Thanks for telling me right away. Otherwise I should have gone mad.”

  “That, of course, was why I told you,” he said. His voice was still soft, still calm. And she felt soothed, in spite of the dark terror just past, in spite of the intellectual realization that this diabolical man used words and tones and human emotions as coldly as Pan himself piping his reed, sounding what stop he pleased. That quiet, deep voice went on: “You see, you are now a valuable member of our twentieth-century staff, with a vested interest in the success of our purpose. You thoroughly understand the system of rewards and punishments for good or bad service. You will have food, a roof over your head, money to spend—and eternal youth! Woman, look at your face again, look hard, and rejoice at your good fortune. Weep for thos
e who have nothing but old age and death as their future. Look hard, I say!”

  It was like gazing at a marvelous photograph out of the past, except that she had been somewhat prettier in the actuality, her face more rounded, not so sharp, more girlish. She was twenty again, but different, more mature, leaner. She heard his voice go on dispassionately, a distant background to her own thoughts, feeding, feeding at the image in the mirror.

  “As you can see,” Dr. Lell said, “you are not truly yourself as you were at twenty. This is because we could only manipulate the time tensions which influenced your thirty-year-old body according to the rigid mathematical laws governing the energies and forces involved. We could not undo the harm wrought these last rather prim, introverted years of your life because you have already lived them, and nothing can change that.”

  It came to her that he. was talking to give her time to recover from the deadliest shock that had ever stabbed into a human brain. And for the first time she thought, not of herself, but of the incredible things implied by every action that had occurred, every word spoken.

  . “Who are you?”

  He was silent. The car twisted in and out of the clamorous traffic, and she watched his face now, that lean, strange, dark, finely chiseled, evil face with its glittering dark eyes. For the moment she felt no repulsion, only a gathering fascination at the way that strong chin tilted unconsciously as he said in a cold, proud, ringing voice, “We are the masters of time. We live at the farthest frontier of time itself, and all the ages belong to us. No words could begin to describe the vastness of our empire or the futility of opposing us.” He stopped. Some of the fire faded from his dark eyes. His brows knit, his chin dropped, his lips clamped into a thin line, then parted as he snapped, “I hope that any ideas you have had for further opposition will yield to the logic of events and of fact. Now you know why we hire women who have no friends.”

  “You devil!” She half-sobbed the words.

  “Ah,” he said softly. “I can see you understand a woman’s psychology. Two final points should clinch the argument I am trying to make. First, I can read your mind, every thought that comes into it, every emotion that moves it. And second, before establishing the machine in that particular building, we explored the years to come; and during all the time investigated, found the machine unharmed, its presence unsuspected by those in authority. Therefore, the future record is that you did nothing! I think you will agree that this is convincing.”

  Norma nodded dully, her mirror forgotten. “Yes,” she said, “yes, I suppose it is.”

  4

  Miss Norma Matheson

  Calonian Recruiting Station

  322 Carlton Street

  Dear Norma:

  I made a point of addressing the envelope of this letter to you c/o General Delivery, instead of the above address. I would not care to put you in any danger, however imaginary. I use the word imaginary deliberately for I cannot begin to describe how grieved and astounded I was to receive such a letter from the girl I once loved—it’s eleven years since I proposed on graduation day, isn’t it?—and how amazed I was by your questions and statements about time travel.

  I might say that if you are not already mentally unbalanced, you will be shortly unless you take hold of yourself. The very fact that you were nerving yourself to commit suicide when this man—Dr. Lell—hired you from a park bench to be clerk in the recruiting station, is evidence of your hysteria. You could have gone on city relief.

  I see that you have lost none of your powers of self-expression. Your letter, mad though it is in subject matter, is eminently coherent and well thought out. Your drawing of the face of Dr. Lell is a remarkable piece of work.

  If it is a true resemblance, then I agree that he is definitely not, shall I say, Western. His eyes are distinctly slanted, like the Chinese. You show the skin to be dark, indicating a faint Negro strain. His nose is very fine and sensitive, strong in character.

  This effect is incremented by his firm mouth, though those thin lips are much too arrogant—the whole effect is of an extraordinarily intelligent men, a supermongrel in appearance. Such people could probably be produced in the southeastern provinces of Asia.

  I pass without comment over your description of the machine which swallows up the unsuspecting recruits. The superman has apparently not objected to answering your questions since the police station incident; and so we have a new theory of time and space.

  Time, he states, is the all, the only reality. Every unfolding instant the Earth and its life, the universe and all its galaxies are re-created by the titanic energy that is time. And always it is essentially the same pattern that is reformed, because that is the easiest course.

  He makes a comparison. According to Einstein, and in this he is correct, the Earth goes around the Sun, not because there is such a force as gravitation, but because it is easier for it to go around the Sun in exactly the way it does than to hurtle off into space.

  It is easier for time to re-form the same pattern of rock, the same man, the same tree, the same earth. That is all; that is the law.

  The rate of reproduction is approximately ten billion a second. During the past minute, therefore, six hundred billion replicas of myself have been created; and all of them are still there, each-a separate body occupying its own space, completely unaware of the others. Not one has been destroyed. There is no purpose; it is simply easier to let them stay there than to destroy them.

  If those bodies ever met in the same space—that is, if I should go back and shake hands with my twenty-year-old self there would be a clash of similar patterns, and the interloper would be distorted out of memory and shape.

  I have no criticism of this theory to make, other than that it is utterly fantastic. However, it is very interesting in the vivid picture it draws of an eternity of human beings, breeding and living and dying in the quiet eddies of the time stream, while the great current flares on ahead in a fury of incredible creation.

  I am puzzled by the detailed information you are seeking—you make it almost seem real—but I give the answers for what they are worth:

  1. Time travel would naturally be based on the most rigid mechanical laws.

  2. It seems plausible that they would be able to investigate your future actions.

  3. Dr. Lell used phrases such as “atomic storm” and “gas-immunization injections.” The implication is that they are recruiting for an unimaginably great war.

  4. I cannot see how the machine could act on you over a distance—unless there was some sort of radio-controled intermediate. In your position, I would ask myself one question: Was there anything, any metal, anything, upon my person that might have been placed there by an enemy?

  5. Some thoughts are so dimly held that they could not possibly be transmitted. Presumably, sharp, clear thoughts might be receivable. If you could keep your mind calm, as you say you did while deciding to write the letter—the letter itself is proof that you succeeded.

  6. It is unwise to assume that here is greater basic intelligence; but rather greater development of the potential forces of the mind. If men ever learn to read minds, it will be because they train their innate capacity for mind reading; they will be cleverer only when new knowledge adds new techniques of training.

  To become personal, I regret immeasurably having heard from you. I had a memory of a rather brave spirit, rejecting my proposal of marriage, determined to remain independent, ambitious for advancement in the important field of social services. Instead, I find a sorry ending, a soul degenerated, a mind feeding on fantasia and a sense of incredible persecution. My advice is: go to a psychiatrist before it is too late, and to that end I enclose a money order for $200, and extend you my best wishes.

  Yours in memory, Jack Garson

  * * *

  At least there was no interference with her private life. No footsteps but her own ever mounted the dark, narrow flight of stairs that led to her tiny apartment. At night, after the recruiting shop closed, she
walked the crowded streets. Sometimes, there was a movie that seemed to promise surcease from the deadly strain of living. Sometimes a new book on her old love, the social sciences, held her for a brief hour.

  But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could relax the burning pressure of the reality of the machine. It was always there, like a steel band drawn tautly around her mind.

  It was crazy funny to read about the Calonian War, and the victories and the defeats, when somewhere in the . future an even greater war was being fought; a war so great that all the ages were being ransacked for manpower. And men came! Dark men, blond men, young men, grim men, hard men, and veterans of other wars. The stream of them was a steady flow into that dimly lighted back room. And one day she looked up from an intent, mindless study of the pattern of the stained old counter, and there was Jack Garson!

  He leaned on the counter, not much older looking after ten years, a little leaner of face perhaps, and there were tired lines around his dark eyes. While she stared at him in dumb paralysis, he said, “I had to come, of course. You were the first emotional tie I had, and also the last. When I wrote that letter, I didn’t realize how strong that emotion still is. What’s all this about?”

  She thought with a flaming intensity: Often in the past, Dr. Lell had vanished for brief periods during the day hours. Once, she had seen him -disappear into the flamboyant embrace of the light shed by the machine. Twice, she had opened the door of his room to speak to him, and found him gone.

  All accidental observations! It meant he had stepped scores of times into his own world when she hadn’t seen him.

  Please let this be one of the times when he was away.

  A second thought came, so fierce, so sharply focused that it made a pain inside her head. She must be calm. She must hold her mind away from giveaway thoughts, if it was not already ages too late.