A faint, soundless vibration seized the ship and its occupants, mounting swiftly to a mighty quivering that threatened momentarily to shake every molecule of matter within the range of the time machine into its component atoms. Kerry’s thoughts were a garbled, jumbled, inchoate mass, as though the vibration had set thought impulses quivering into being without rational guidance. Memories of childhood mingled with flashing images of purely imaginary things. Emotions shook him in kaleidoscopic disorder. Sights and sounds of maddening intensity mingled with an incredible hegira of all his senses, as though every nerve in his mind and body were a string in some strange instrument, and a mad musician were playing the combined discords of all eternity. And all of this concentrated in a single timeless instant.
Suddenly it ended!
Like a spring unwinding, Kerry Kord’s muscles relaxed. Had the time machine worked? He was sure it had, for he had confidence in his father’s work, and he believed that in all probability he knew as much or more about the device than the Overlord.
He looked at Andrev, a question on his lips—and his eyes widened with sudden interest and a flare of hope surged through him. Andrev seemed frozen into rigidity, staring incredulously into the viewing plate, his expression one of utter consternation. His pistol dangled limply from flaccid fingers. Without a glance at Kerry he arose and strode into the transparent nose of the ship. As he stared at whatever lay beyond, his massive frame seemed to sag limply, and Terry heard him utter dazedly:
“What—what happened? Where’s—the Earth?”
Craning his neck, Kerry stared at the tele-viewer, and his forehead furrowed in a thoughtful frown. Certainly there was reason for Andrev’s surprise. The blackness of space filled the oval screen, star-flecked space sweeping past in a constantly changing panorama as the rocket plane described its circular orbit. Now red light flared suddenly in the screen—light, Kerry saw through narrowed, tear-filled eyelids, streaming from a crimson, cooling binary sun! Twin suns like burnished copper discs large as dinner plates, circling about each other!
The double sun vanished, moving out of the viewer’s field of vision, and almost instantly the surface of a planet sprang into view. They were dangerously close, for details were plainly visible. A strange world of vast level plains covered with pallid gray-green vegetation, of low, rolling hills worn smooth by the weathering of milleniums. An ancient world of shallow, tideless seas, a world as Earth might be in a million years.
But this wasn’t Earth—Kerry knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt. It was a smaller world—and never would old Earth revolve around a binary star. Kerry’s thoughts raced. There must be an explanation . . . there was something his father had said concerning time travel . . . Kerry’s wonderment suddenly dissipated and he grinned to himself. There were some things about travel through the time dimension that Andrev didn’t know . . .
Andrev! With feline smoothness Kerry slid to his feet, his rubber-soled boots making no sound on the metal floor. He sent lightning glances darting about for a weapon, but he saw nothing that would serve. His fists curled into hard knots and his muscles quivered with anticipation. This was his chance—and he dared not fail!
He had crossed most of the intervening distance when something seemed to warn Andrev, for Kerry saw him stiffen. He covered the last few yards in a whirlwind rush, his right fist drawn far back—and as Andrev spun around, that fist drove home with every ounce of power of Kerry’s command.
CHAPTER IV
ANDREV reeled backward to crash heavily into the nose of the rocket ship. His pistol spun from his hand, skittered against the smooth wall and landed a dozen feet away.
Swiftly the big man leaped erect, shaking himself like some great animal. His face was that of a beast of prey, the veins standing out on his forehead like ugly, bloated worms. A gutteral oath oozed from between his clenched jaws as he sprang.
Kerry met his charge with savage blows of both fists against the jutting jaw; then the force of the charge carried them into a clinch. Kerry winced as a white hot knife of pain stabbed him—Andrev’s knee finding the pit of his stomach. Viciously he drove his fingers into the Overlord’s eyes, and the big man writhed free, sucking his breath between his teeth. He leaped back out of the range of Kerry’s fists, his low, rasping snarl a sound horrible to hear—then swiftly he charged, his neck swollen and his eyes engorged with blood.
Kerry ducked under a heavy blow, landed a powerful overhand swing, then staggered back as Andrev’s fist landed solidly against his chin. The Overlord followed, an insane chuckle rumbling deep in his throat, his great fists swinging. Some of the blows Kerry caught on fists and forearms; others reached their mark; and Kerry began to realize that every advantage lay with Andrev. Despite the years which he must have lived, he was physically in his prime and a tremendously powerful man.
Desperately Kerry leaped for Andrev’s throat. His hands found their hold—and simultaneously two rigid thumbs drove into his own windpipe. They crashed to the floor, locked in deadly embrace. An icy pang of fear swept up Kerry’s spine. The neck in his grasp seemed to swell and solidify like a pillar of stone—and his own throat was yielding to that merciless pressure. Frantically his fingers clawed at the Overlord’s contorted visage. The man was killing him! He felt his lungs swelling unbearably, and black spots danced and grew before his eyes. Fear made his thoughts desperately clear. He remembered something he had seen during a fight in the dark tunnels under New York. If only he could get some air . . .
His fingers hooked in the corners of Andrev’s mouth and he pulled. With a grunt of pain the Overlord tore his face free from the rending fingers, releasing Kerry’s throat. With the first great draft of air, Kerry wrenched his head upright and clasped his hands behind the other’s skull. A split second of bunching muscles, and with all his strength he drove the top of his head into Andrev’s face!
The ghastly crunch of splintering bone grated on the air, and the Overlord screamed with pain. He tore fiercely at Kerry’s hands, but the fingers were locked. Again the smaller man battered with brutal, stunning force; a shudder of agony wracked Andrev’s frame and he sagged limply, a faint brutish whine sobbing in his throat and his breath blubbering through smashed lips and flattened bleeding nose.
WITH HEAVING lungs Kerry Kord rolled free and reeled to his feet. He looked down at the beaten dictator, savage satisfaction in his narrowed eyes. Something of the personal debt he owed had been paid.
“Andrev!” he barked.
The big man started fearfully and his trembling fingers strove to wipe the blood from his eyes. “Yes,” he whispered hoarsely, desperate fear in his voice.
“You were startled by what you saw outside the plane. Why?”
Andrev sucked in a tortured breath. “We—we are out in space—and the Sun and the Earth—have disappeared! Even the constellations—have changed! Something went wrong!”
Kerry grinned mirthlessly. “Nothing went wrong. What has happened was to be expected. Nothing else could happen! We have travelled in moments a thousand years of time through the Fourth Dimension. We travelled independently of three dimensional space—and the Earth, the Solar System, was moving away from us into infinity at an inconceivable speed for a thousand years! We moved into our future a thousand years through Time in less than a minute—but no machine imaginable by our intelligence could travel in those moments through the infinite distances in space which our Solar System and Galaxy have traversed in ten centuries.”[*]
Andrev’s terrified whine was a sickening thing. Courage and morale were completely broken. “Then—then we’re lost out here in space—without supplies—alone!” The last word was little more than a gasp; and the big man buried his ruined face in his hands and wept.
With a shudder of revulsion Kerry picked up the rocket-pistol and thrust it into the holster which had held his Ghormley. He found his knife and automatic in a niche beside the control panel and thrust them into his belt. Then he centered his attention upon the dials and gauges tha
t controlled the flight of the ship through space and time. The plane had a standard rocket drive, he noted with satisfaction; that would cause him no difficulty.
Carefully he noted their position as Andrev had set it when starting their orbit around the Himalayan peaks. Carefully he calculated the time that had elapsed since they had started their journey. Then with skillful touch he sent the ship into a steep dive toward the ancient world below them.
Smoothly he brought the plane to rest in a bleak little valley beside a tiny watercourse. Dwarf trees, shorter than a man and crowned with dull gray-green foliage, lined its banks. There was no sign of animal life save a small froglike creature basking in the light of the crimson double sun. According to all appearances it was a world which, except for its size, might very well support human life. If the air were fit . . .
Kerry shrugged. Andrev could test the air. If it were harmless and lifesupporting, well and good—if not, that was all right too. He turned to the former dictator.
“Andrev, get up!”
The big man dragged himself to his feet, panting noisily, stood there swaying, his head bent far forward.
“Andrev,” Kerry continued dispassionately, “I had planned to kill you, but I’ve changed my mind. You may live. This nameless little world is your future home. You wanted to rule a world—rule this one. It’s yours—forever! Yours—alone!”
Andrev shuddered. “Alone!” he whispered. “Alone!”
With rocket pistol in one hand, Kerry held his breath, opened the door and gestured toward the outside. Like an automaton the erstwhile Overlord stumbled from the rocket ship and Kerry wrenched the door shut behind him. He sprang into the transparent nose of the plane to watch.
Panting in the thin air, the spiritless Andrev staggered across the gray-green slope to the stream, sat down. He looked around him hesitantly, his hand upon his battered face, terror dawning in his reddened eyes . . .
High above the little world, seated at the controls of the rocket ship, Kerry Kord adjusted the viewing plate to catch a final glimpse of a dark spot on the gray-green expanse—Andrev. He manipulated the telescopic instrument till he could see him clearly. He hadn’t moved, save that the fingers of one hand were plucking idly at bruised and bleeding lips, lips that sagged vacuously—
Kerry shut off the view—and in his heart was no pity for a man who deserved no pity. Grim-faced and unrelenting he adjusted the rocket ship’s controls to the position he had so carefully recorded.
Lost? He wasn’t lost, as Andrev had supposed. He had but to return through the Fourth Dimension to his own time, and again the Earth would be in that particular part of space—a world now freed forever from Andrev the Overlord.
[*] According to Harlow Shapley, our entire watch-shaped Galaxy rotates around a central axis, not as a solid, but with different speeds at different distances from the center. Measures of radial and transverse motions indicate that at our distance from the center of the Galaxy (some 30,000 light years) our speed in the orbit of revolution is something like two hundred miles a second. Accordingly, the Solar System would have been moving away from the time machine at the rate of two hundred miles a second for a thousand years . . . In addition, the Galaxy itself is supposedly rushing away from some central point in the universe, separating the rocket plane from the Solar System by a corresponding distance.
1957
THE FUZZIES
They were sensitive to violence or even thoughts of violence, and were capable of abandoning you—if need be.
Prospecting on bleak, fantastic Ganymede usually had its drawbacks, but still more so when you were hunting a man you had reason to believe had once tried to kill you. Lloyd Eshbach, head of Fantasy Press, returns with this story of the unusual Fuzzies and courage against fantastic odds.
SCOWLING, Ken Landis squinted through the driving snowfall, straining to see what lay before him in the swirling carbon dioxide blizzard. A gale whipped around the double walled plastic fishbowl that was his helmet, though he could hardly hear a sound. The vacuum between the two transparent globes and the tremendously thick insulating padding of his suit shut out almost all of the effects of the Ganymedean storm.
It was insanity, this wandering about in a world so cold that oxygen and carbon dioxide froze, where the atmosphere was a mixture of neon and methane—a world that was a vast, featureless, wind-swept plain where there was no way for a man to determine north, east, south or west—where nothing lived. Nothing, that is, save fools like him—and Herb Swain—and scores of other prospectors who plodded across this frigid hell, dragging their vacuum bottle, half-blister homes behind them.
All because of the Fuzzies!
He withdrew his left arm from the massive sleeve of his armor and touched a warm pulsating ball in the special pocket of his jacket—a living sphere about the size of a large grapefruit, a snow white, fur covered sphere which was probably the strangest life form in the Solar System. A Martian Fuzzy.
“Which way now, Nathan?” he asked casually.
The answer formed within his mind. “To your left—a bit more—now straight ahead.”
“You’re sure it’s Swain up there? Not some other Terran?”
“It is Swain. Richard is with him.”
Richard. That was Swain’s Fuzzy—or, as he sometimes felt, Swain’s master; no, employer. The Fuzzies never used compulsion, and they paid—paid well.
Just as he was going to pay Swain for what he had done to him! Ken’s jaw set grimly. For more than a year he’d been promising himself there’d be a day of reckoning—and it looked as though it had finally come. When he and Swain met this time—
He put the thought aside as he became aware of the distress emanating from Nathan, his Fuzzy. Fuzzies liked people—likeable people, that is—and they were incredibly sensitive to violence or thoughts of violence. They would not stay with a criminal, for example; and to be forsaken by your Fuzzy on Ganymede was sure death. Strange—and macabre—how a Fuzzy “left”. They simply died!
A question recurred in Ken’s mind. With the natural Fuzzy aversion to violence, why was Nathan guiding him to Swain? He gave a mental shrug. There was a lot he didn’t know about the Fuzzies—a lot that no Terran knew.
Odd how all this had started. The first ship to land on Mars had found the Fuzzies living in the depths of vast, abysmal caves, the only intelligent life form on the planet. Intelligent they must be, since they were perfect telepaths. Any Fuzzy could communicate with any other Fuzzy—or all others—at any time over any conceivable distance! And with equal ease, apparently, they could communicate with men.
Not too much was known about their life in the caves of Mars, since they actually lived within warrens inside the cavern walls. They were not alone; with them dwelt spider-like creatures which provided their arms and legs; a symbolic relationship that evidently had existed for uncounted ages.
Some of the Fuzzies had accompanied the crew of that first space ship on its return to Earth; and later, had gone with other ships as they explored the rest of the Solar System. And on Ganymede they had found what, apparently, they had been looking for—deposits of crystals of strangely complex composition, mildly radio-active. They seemed to be an unparalleled merging of a hydrous uranium sulphate and ytterbium nitrate, forming pale green prismatic crystals of moderate size. Of no apparent value to Terrestrials, they were of infinite worth to the Fuzzies—though what they did with them, no one knew. Among the things they offered in payment was a Martian drug which swiftly and surely cured cancer—and immediately the Ganymedean crystal hunt was on.
Prospecting was easy, technically speaking. All one needed was a Fuzzy. By means of some strange sense the Martians could detect deposits of crystals; and by that uncanny sense of direction which every Fuzzy had, they could fix its location so that other men with excavating machinery—and F u z z i e s—could find the claim.
There was a twofold reason why Ganymede was not crowded with prospectors. First, the Fuzzies were very selective i
n their choice of companions. Very few of the rugged individuals who applied for prospecting permits qualified. Second, it took a brave man—or a fool—to tackle this crazy little world. He was there only because the returns were so enticing.
In one year he could make more on Ganymede than in a lifetime spent as a math prof in a second rate college. Only he’d had to waste a year in a hospital back on Earth recuperating from wounds inflicted by a man named Swain—who was somewhere up ahead hiding behind that curtain of dry ice!
“Far to go yet, Nathan?” he asked tensely.
“We are there,” came the answer.
Mentally cursing the swirling veil of white, Landis peered through the murk. Then he saw looming up not ten feet away the rounded shape of a half-blister—a metal shelter shaped like a quarter of a globe on runners—an igloo sliced through the middle. It was big enough to hold a man comfortably; and it was the only thing that made life even passably bearable on the Ganymedean ice.
Unhooking his own shelter from the clamps that held it to the back of his suit, he drew it up close to the face of the other. Since all such shelters came from the same Terrestrial mill and were made to meet government specifications, they were outwardly identical, and had to fit together. Opening the door with pressure on a switch, he stepped inside and drew the shelters together. As clamps caught, he knew that he and his enemy were sealed within a compact metal igloo.
With prudence and patience born of experience and knowledge that carelessness meant death, he checked airpressure gauge and thermometer, saw that the atomic heater was functioning properly, then began the task of getting out of his suit. Every motion was slow and deliberate. Oddly enough, now that the goal of a year lay at hand he felt coldly calm. Not that he had changed his mind. Herb Swain had shot him in what was to have been a fair fight—only his gun had not been loaded—and Swain must have known it!
Forgotten Fiction Page 68