by Jimmy Guieu
Taylor opened his arms without finishing his thought.
“The only clue we have, Mr. President, is the date you gave us. Our first stop, then, will be September 3, the day before Streiler and Harrington first left. Logically we should find them and explain what’s going to happen… until they disappear. So, it’ll be easy for them to take what they’ll need with them and save themselves and our French friends. Going back a little farther in the Past, for example, to save them from the setbacks awaiting them…”
Programmed to go back to September 3, 1961, the RT2 left Space-Time. Commander Taylor left the time travel commands and Rudy Clark turned on the gravito-magnetic boosters.
The ship was flying silently over Death Valley and heading southeast to land near Los Angeles. The report from the President said that on September 3, 1961 Harrington and Streiler were still in the city at 2 pm. Kurt was at Harrington’s house preparing for their departure the next day.
At a very high altitude the RT2 was flying over Kramer at the intersection of highways 395 and 466 to the north of the Mojave Desert when the light on the radar-viewer started blinking. The screen lit up showing a weird triangular ship that was speeding toward the Retrotimeship. The electronic brain instantly plotted a new course and safety measures were taken by the automatic pilot. In a split second the RT2 leaped into outer space while the strange spaceship, at breakneck speed, shot a purple beam into the space that the Retrotimeship had occupied a second earlier.
These maneuvers happened almost instantly. The electronic brain on board compensated for the inevitable slowness of human reflexes that cannot match the speed and accuracy of the trajectory calculator.
Clark looked worriedly at his superior. “Did you see that, Commander? If it wasn’t for the automatic safety system we’d be toast.”
“Damn,” Taylor swore. “What got into that animal? It was like it was trying to ram our ship.”
“Ram? For a second I thought its nose was shooting a pink or purple ray at us.”
“So, I wasn’t seeing things. I, too, believed I saw a beam just missing us. Clark, turn on the invisibility shields. I’m not feeling good about that triangular ship.”
Clark obeyed and pressed a big red button in the middle of the control panel. Six small lights stared blinking green, confirming that the four lateral shields and one on each end were working, making the ship invisible by reducing its refraction index to zero. At the same time the system was absorbing radar waves instead of bouncing them back, making the ship undetectable.
“I’ll be damned,” Clark grumbled, “we’re reacting like we’re in enemy territory. But we’re in our home country.”
“Sure,” Commander Taylor remarked, “but I still don’t know why the flying triangle did that. It wasn’t an American spaceship. And it’s not Polarian either since our friends the Men from Outer Space only use discs, spheres and rockets.”
“Our planets were federated with the Polarians and a lot of other solar systems and we know what ships they use. I don’t know where that one could have come from.”
“In fact, it could have just been an American prototype that was intimidating us to get us out of its way… Let’s head for Los Angeles but leave the invisibility on for now.”
At reduced speed and high altitude they flew over Palmdale, 25 miles NNW of Los Angeles. The scintillation counters on the outside of the RT2 detected a source of radioactivity. On the control panel a tiny, frosted, green screen lit up and numbers marking the strength of the radiation clicked by under the astonished eyes of the two men.
“500 Roentgens!” Commander Taylor turned pale.
The number disappeared and was replaced by 550, then 600 and wavered around 700.
“780 Roentgens! It’s… it’s not possible!” Lieutenant Clark muttered as he set the ship to fly off at 30,000 mph into space.
The pilots were protected from this formidable speed by an anti-G force field. They felt nothing, but beads of sweat started covering their foreheads.
“780 Roentgens,” Taylor repeated in a daze. “How could such radiation show up only 25 miles from Los Angeles? No human organism could withstand it!”
“The source seems to be coming from south or southwest of Los Angeles,” Clark turned on the viewer showing the landscape almost 2,000 miles beneath them.
Both of them groaned almost simultaneously. Stunned, unbelieving, they were watching the image on the screen. They saw Los Angeles—or what used to be Los Angeles. Of the marvelous buildings, parks, beautiful streets, geometric buildings of the Hollywood studios, nothing remained but a frightening chaos of ruins, masses of melted metal and dust everywhere from which clouds of smoke were rising. Lieutenant Clark cleared his dry throat but he could only emit a muffled sound. Taylor was shaken up as well and automatically checked the Kentempograph to make sure it was really September 3, 1961.
“I… I don’t understand,” he muttered. “Such a catastrophe never took place in Los Angeles on September 3, 1961, and yet… Los Angeles is razed to the ground, completely destroyed by a thermo-nuclear bomb probably… Unless there was another slip in Space-Time of the whole North American continent just when we were traveling into the Past? But even still? A catastrophe like this couldn’t happen in the Past, near or far! It has to be a new kind of disturbance in the Dimension of Time. We have to be sure, Clark. Look for an area free of radioactivity and we’ll land.”
Without saying a word Clark brought the Retrotimeship down to Earth. Half an hour later the invisible ship landed silently in the Anza Desert, 13 miles west of the shore of the Salton Sea. The Lieutenant opened the rear ventral hold and the gigantic, rectangular hatch unfolded slowly toward the ground where its top sank into the ochre sand. The two men entered the hold and climbed into the helicopter that was parked there.
The machine was a helicopter only in name. It had no blades because it was propelled by a gravito-magnetic field. It looked like an oval ball, the lower part was shiny metal and the top, the cockpit, was transparent. 22 feet high by 13 in diameter at its base it could hold eight passengers.
The reconnaissance craft slid down the carriage of the inclined ramp formed by the hatch and came off to float around eight inches off the ground. The ventral hatch was closed by remote control and the helicopter rose up quickly, heading toward Mecca, a small town on the NNW bank of the Salton Sea, 183 miles from Los Angeles.
After flying over the huge stretch of water and coming in sight of land the pilots were in for another surprise: no trace of a town appeared in the place where Mecca should have been according to the map. The helicopter followed the shore, heading east, until they saw, 20 miles from the point where Mecca should have stood, a group of buildings.
“The place seems peaceful enough,” Commander Taylor noted. “Since Mecca is conspicuously absent, we should land there on the empty land to the north of that town.”
A few minutes later the two men left the aircraft, each armed with a paralyzing rifle after taking the precaution of slipping a disintegrator pistol (the formidable Polarian weapon) under their arms. At the entrance to the sunlit town a sign read “Mishka” in big blue letters on a white background.
“Mishka? Mecca? It’s close… but different.”
The streets were deserted between the clean, bright buildings that were only four or five stories high except for one massive, rectangular, bright green building that stood over 150 feet higher than the rest in the center of town.
The first person the officers met was an old woman in a white tunic held tightly around her scrawny neck. She was limping along, using a weird, glass cane, and stood in the middle of the street to look suspiciously at the two strangers walking toward her.
“Excuse me, madam,” Commander Taylor said, “but we’ve had a… breakdown and would like to contact the… mayor or sheriff or any authority in Mec… Mishka.”
The old woman looked at them one at a time, blinking her eyes, and croaked, “Authority? If it’s Dr. Avshton you want, you’ll fin
d him over there,” she pointed to the huge green building dominating the sleepy town.
Walking toward the place they passed two men and farther along a woman, all three old and dressed the same: red sandals and a white tunic gathered at the neck.
The officers rang the bell of the only door of the big building and a young woman opened. She did not try to hide the surprise on her pretty face. Her brown hair fell to her shoulders and swept the shiny, bright yellow tissue of her tight blouse.
“Is it possible to see Dr. Avshton, miss?” Commander Taylor asked after bowing slightly before the young woman looking at them with wide eyes.
She finally pulled her attention away from their uniforms and in a gentle voice said, “Would you follow me? Dr. Avshton will certainly see you.”
Dropped on the fifth floor by a silent elevator they were led into a huge room that was, apparently, both an office and examining room to judge by the tables and numerous metal cabinets that decorated the place, separated from the office by a heavy, white curtain that was shiny but opaque.
Dr. Avshton, dark-haired and very young, also wore a yellow shirt that was shiny. Just like the young lady who had brought the visitors, he did not try to hide his surprise as he stared long and hard at their uniforms.
“Commander Taylor, Strategic Air Command, and this is Lieutenant Clark.”
“Very honored, gentlemen,” the doctor nodded and offered them to sit. “And to what do I owe this honor?”
“We were making a reconnaissance flight in the area and a mechanical problem forced us to land near Mec… Mishka. After making our repairs, we took the opportunity to visit your town.”
This explanation seemed to surprise their host even more. Before responding he addressed the young woman standing next to the door. “Stay here, Shora. Sit down.” Then he turned to his visitors. “I’m afraid I don’t understand… Commander Taylor, what you mean. Your breakdown I get but the fact that you were compelled to visit our town, as you call it, surprises me. Don’t you know that Mishka is a forbidden zone to everyone… of your age? Unless you were… sent by the authorities?”
The surprise of the two officers was clearly more than the doctor’s.
Taylor tried a trick to justify their presence in this zone. “Please excuse me, Doctor, but we’re on an official mission and we’re not at liberty to reveal the details. So, I ask you to keep this strictly between ourselves. Even the authorities… of the area and of California don’t know about it.”
“So be it. You can trust me.”
“Out of curiosity, Dr. Avshton,” Clark said, “could you tell us exactly when this zone was created?”
“June 13, 1357, to be exact. But it wasn’t so long ago that you could forget…”
The two officers had trouble hiding their astonishment but managed not to even look at each other.
“1357,” Mark Taylor thought aloud. “So that would be now…”
“21 years ago,” Avshton finished for him, keeping a careful eye on the strange visitors.
“That’s right,” Clark nodded. “And you’re satisfied with your… post?”
“Well now, I couldn’t find a better place for my work on biological aging, could I?”
“Indeed,” Clark agreed, praying to all the saints in paradise not to abandon him and his chief.
“All the old people in Calofnia were sent here to end their days. We help them the best we can in their final months of life. The law voted in 1357 is cruel to order these old men and women to leave their home, their children, their friends and come here when they reach 60 years old… Mishka,” he murmured thoughtfully, “the dead zone, as they call Calofnia. Sad reputation. We try hard, however, to let them die in their old age without too much physical pain. Our mechano-hypnotic treatments also protect them from emotional suffering… at least most of them.”
He paused, hesitating, then decided to admit, “At the risk of appearing like anarchists to you, Commander Taylor, I’m sorry I didn’t live in the last century, free of all these… modern constraints.”
“Aren’t we all,” Clark ventured to agree.
The doctor stared at him for a long time, raised an eyebrow and calmly remarked, “I don’t want to… offend you, Lieutenant Clark, or you, Commander Taylor, but your… attitude and your comments suggest you don’t belong to the… dictatorial army.”
The doctor’s reluctance and carefully chosen words made the officers suspicious. This man seemed honest and sincere but he was hiding something.
“Listen, Dr. Avshton,” Commander Taylor took a risk, “since we’ve been talking—courteously—I’m sure that we both feel like we’re being duped. Am I wrong?”
Avshton glanced at his assistant, who had not opened her mouth, before saying, “I admit that I’ve been thinking the same thing.”
“And your conclusion? Especially since our uniforms don’t impress you. I told you that we’re on an official mission but that’s not true. Here we’re acting on our own; I admit it.”
“You have no need to admit that, Commander. I believe you wholeheartedly especially since your uniforms… belong to no army I know of.”
This time the two officers could not hide their surprise.
“Who are you and where do you come from?”
Taylor answered with another question, “Do you have a calendar, doctor?”
Once again the doctor raised his eyebrows and with an expression of amused bewilderment he gave to his mysterious visitors a shiny block from his desk. Silently but unconsciously moving their lips the two Americans read the numbers that appeared on the chrome metal calendar: 3-9-1378.
“September 3, 1378,” Clark repeated aloud, scratching his forehead.
His chief took a deep breath and said, “We’re Americans and we come from September 3… 1961.”
CHAPTER VIII
It was Avshton’s and Shora’s turn to shiver. “You say you come from the Future?” the doctor batted his eyes.
“Yes and no. Because if we came from the Future we would find here in this area… a village in 1378… an Indian village and not a modern city. Because America was not discovered until 1492 and colonized afterward by the whites. At this time only the old continent was civilized. And yet, could we call civilized a people who knew nothing of cars, planes, movies, television and everything that today belongs to modern man?”
“But you claim to have traveled through Time?”
“Yes, but not in our Time, in our Past, which is terribly different than your Time and Past. And that’s what I don’t understand either.”
Avshton stared at the young woman, then at his visitors before raising his voice, “By Kahen and Heaven! If you don’t understand, how am I supposed to?”
“You speak our language and despite your strange clothes and some weird turns of phrase, you are certainly Earthlings like us,” Clark observed.
“Naturally I’m an Earthling. Did you think you’d find a Polarian here?”
“Polarian?” the two officers were startled. “That’s the first time I’ve heard a link between our two eras. How do you know about the Polarians in 1378 when they don’t come to Earth until 1958?”
“Not at all. The Polarians tried to make contact with Earthlings in 1213.”
“Tried? So they failed?”
The Franshais spaceships chased them away from our planet to preserve their global domination,” the doctor explained.
“French spaceships? In 1213? During the reign of the Capetian King, Philip II?”
“Capetian? Philip II? But no! Under the government of Norbi Hyoky, the dictator at the time. By Kahen and Heaven, we’ll never understand each other.”
“Kahen,” Rudy Clark thought aloud. “That sounds like Cain.”
“Cain?”
“A bible character. One of the sons of Adam and Eve…”
“Adam and Eve?” Avshton echoed without understanding. “Kahen and Heaven is a kind of… polite swear word. Kahen was the name of a kind of divinity and Heaven is w
here He came from with her brothers and sisters.”
“I think, doctor, that you might want to teach us a little of your history, otherwise we’ll end up in a ridiculous and endless maze of misunderstandings.”
“From the beginning of history, preferably,” Taylor added.
“So be it. But don’t expect anything more than a very basic sketch—I’m no historian. So, Tradition says, partly backed up by archeological finds, that around 2,200 years ago an iron bird—we’d call it a spaceship—came down from Heaven and landed on Earth. This happened in Fransh, not far from Parish, 15 or 20 miles from the present city.”
“Paris no doubt,” Rudy Clark corrected.
“No, Parish. Out of this iron bird came demi-gods and demi-goddesses who established contact with the primitives, our ancestors, then in the Iron Age. These demi-gods, still worshipped by the believers to whom I don’t belong by the way, were called, in the chain of command: Kahen, Dhomoyk, Harkton, Hanlvin and…”
Clark and Taylor felt fear and dread shoot through them as a strange shiver ran down their spines. They wanted to stand up but could not. They just sat there, full of mixed emotions, unable to say a word.
“What’s wrong with you?” Avshton was alarmed.
“It’s nothing,” Taylor managed to say. “Please continue, doctor, and excuse us, your story hit us pretty hard. We’ll explain why later.”
“As you wish. So, I was saying that the demi-gods Kahen, Hool his wife, their brothers and their sisters Gh’en and Douk’ha, were in contact with an Iron Age people. Apparently their iron bird was damaged and could never be repaired, which forced them to live the rest of their lives in this tribe at the dawn of civilization.
“Where did these… demi-gods come from? From a distant country according to Tradition, but most certainly from another solar system because we now know that at that time no planet of our system had a race evolved enough to build aircraft, let alone spaceships. Kahen and his friends knew how to make our ancestors love them and they were accepted right away, especially since they got all kinds of benefits from them. In fact, while Harkton and Shrylere stayed in the iron bird—maybe they were sick or were trying the fix the mechanical problem—the others patiently educated the primitive people.