Universe 2 - [Anthology] Read online

  The three soldiers moved quietly away from the survey module and Surgenor looked beyond them for the first time. It was curiously difficult to focus his eyes—a sensation rather like peering through a badly adjusted tridi viewer—but he picked out an upright figure, so motionless that it might have been a spar of wood driven into the sand.

  Surgenor felt a pang of awe compounded with respect. If the theories were valid, he was looking at a representative of the most formidable culture men had yet encountered in their blind thrusts across the galaxy, a race which breasted the river of time as easily as a starship sailed the ionic tides of space.

  Every instinct he had told him that such beings should be approached with reverence, and only after they had indicated their willingness, but it was obvious that Giyani had other ideas. He was prepared to use force against an entity which had the power to slip through his fingers like smoke. On the face of it, the action was ill-conceived—and yet Giyani was an intelligent man. Surgenor frowned as he remembered the major’s comment about the Paladorian being a pregnant female.

  The alien figure moved suddenly, its gray shrouds swirling, as the three men drew near.

  One of the men made an abrupt movement with his hand. The hooded alien figure loped away, but had covered only a few paces when it keeled over and fell. Surgenor’s eyes were still trying to adjust to the viewers. For one dread moment he had the impression that the Paladorian had been killed, then he heard the belated hiss of a gas pistol. The three soldiers lifted the inert alien and carried it towards the module. Surgenor engaged the drive and swung the vehicle closer to them, with its nose pointing north.

  For a second, during the slueing turn, the desert seemed to be alive with flickers of light and swooping, shrouded figures; but the illusion faded instantly and by the time he had slid the module to a halt there was nothing visible but the three men and their strange burden. In a few seconds they were inside the vehicle. Surgenor twisted in his seat and stared at the unconscious alien on the floor. Even with the night-viewers on he could barely discern a pale oval face in an aperture of the flowing robes.

  It is a female, he thought, then wondered how he knew.

  “Get moving,” Giyani snapped. “At top speed, mister.”

  Surgenor selected air cushion suspension and engaged forward drive before the module had properly cleared the ground. It accelerated northwards in a snaking, waltzing surge of power, trailing a huge plume of sand.

  Giyani relaxed into his seat with a sigh. “That’s better. Don’t slow down until you see the ships.”

  Surgenor became aware that he could smell the alien. The module’s cabin was filled with a pungent, musky odor, reminiscent of Concord grapes.

  “Think we can go fast enough?” he asked.

  “What does that mean, David?” Giyani’s voice was throaty with excitement or satisfaction.

  “If the Paladorians really can flit about in time there’s no point in trying to surprise them with anything. Or in trying to evade them. All they have to do is go back a few hours and stop you before you get started.”

  “They didn’t do it, did they?”

  “No—but perhaps it’s something to do with avoiding paradoxes . . .” Surgenor broke off as the alien on the floor gave a low moan. At the same instant more ghostly flickers of light appeared and faded on the desert ahead. “We should slow down, major. At this speed we have a longish stopping distance, which means a longish stopping time, and that might make us easier targets.”

  “Targets?”

  “Easier to see. In time, I mean. It makes us more predictable.”

  “I’ve an idea, David.” Giyani turned in his seat and grinned back at Kelvin as he spoke. “Why don’t you take a couple of minutes before dinner tonight and write us a tactical handbook? I’m sure Colonel Nietzel would be grateful for any guidance you could give him.”

  Surgenor shrugged. “It was just a thought.”

  “You could call it ‘Tactics for Temporal Confrontation.’ “ Giyani was unwilling to forego his joke. “By D. Surgenor, chauffeur.”

  “All right, major,” Surgenor said patiently. “I was only. . .”

  His voice was lost as, without warning, Module Five was drenched in blinding greenish light. Sunlight, he thought incredulously, and then the massive vehicle was falling. Images of lush green foliage whipped across the viewscreens as the module tilted, struck the ground on one side and bounded upwards again. There was a series of sharp reports as it mowed down a thicket of small trees, blanking out most of the viewscreens in the process as the sensors were wiped off the outer skin. Finally the vehicle slid to a halt in a tangle of ropy vegetation, and the thunderous sound of its progression gave way to a fretful hissing of gas escaping from a ruptured pipe. A few seconds later the shrill insistent bleeping of an alarm circuit announced that the cabin was becoming contaminated with radioactive matter.

  Surgenor released himself from the clamps which had automatically sprung from the back of his seat at the first impact. He threw open the door nearest to him, admitting a gust of hotly humid air of a kind which —his instincts told him immediately—the planet Palador had not seen in long geological ages.

  * * * *

  They moved back along the rough path which Module Five had created until the polyrad dial on Surgenor’s wrist showed they were at a safe distance from the radioactive spillage inside the vehicle. Kelvin and McErlain set the shrouded alien figure down with its back supported against a shattered tree stump. Although they had covered less than two meters their uniforms were pied with sweat. Surgenor felt his own clothing bind itself wetly to his arms and thighs, but the physical discomfort was insignificant compared to the mental stress of dislocation. Night had become day, and in the same instant had become jungle. The hot yellow sun— the impossible sun—speared into his eyes, filling him with dismay.”

  “One of two things has happened,” Giyani said emotionlessly, sitting down on a tree trunk and massaging his ankle. “We’re in a different place at the same time—or we’re in the same place at a different time.” He met Surgenor’s gaze squarely. “What do you say, David?”

  “I say the first rule in that book on tactics by D. Surgenor, chauffeur, will be ‘Drive slowly’—the way I told you earlier. We almost got ourselves . . .”

  “I know you say that, David. I admit you made a good point back there, or then, but what else do you say?”

  “It looks as though we ran into the Paladorian equivalent of a land-mine. I thought I saw something moving just before we hit.”

  “A mine?” Kelvin said, looking around him with hurt eyes, and Surgenor realized for the first time that the lieutenant was barely out of his teens.

  Giyani nodded. “I’m inclined to agree. We got ourselves a prisoner, and the Paladorians weren’t prepared to stand for that. In similar circumstances we might have used a bomb which would have repositioned the target in space, but the natives here don’t think the way we do. . . .

  “You’ve had geological training, David—how far back would you say we’ve been thrown?”

  “I haven’t had any formal geological training, and the evolutionary timescales vary from planet to planet, but . . .” Surgenor made a gesture which took in the surrounding walls of lush green vegetation, the silent humid air and the eye-pulsing sun “. . . For a climatic change of this magnitude you can probably talk in terms of millions of years. One, ten, fifty—take your pick.” He listened to his own words in fascination, marveling at his body’s ability to go on functioning with every appearance of normalcy in spite of what had happened.

  “As far as that?” Giyani still sounded calm, but worried now.

  “Would it make any difference if I’d said only a thousand years? We’ve been eliminated, major. There’s no way back.” Surgenor tried to accept the fact as he spoke. Giyani nodded slowly, Kelvin lowered his face into cupped hands, and McErlain stood impassively staring at the hooded figure of the Paladorian. With one part of his mind Surgenor noted that
the big sergeant was still holding the rifle which apparently never left his hands.

  “There might be a way back,” McErlain said doggedly. “If we could get some information out of her.” He indicated the Paladorian with his rifle.

  “I doubt it, sergeant.” Giyani looked unimpressed.

  “Well, they made damn certain we didn’t get her back to the ship. Why was that?”

  “I don’t know, sergeant. In any case, stop pointing that bloody rifle at the prisoner. We can’t afford any massacres here.”

  “Sir?” McErlain’s rough-hewn face was pale and set.

  “What is it, sergeant?”

  “The next time you make any reference to my service with the Georgetown,” McErlain said in a level voice, “you’ll get the butt of this rifle down your throat.”

  Giyani jumped to his feet, his brown eyes wide with shock. “Do you know what I can do to you for that?”

  “No, but I’m real interested, major. What can you do to me for that?” The sergeant was holding his rifle as casually as ever, but it had acquired significance.

  “I can start by removing that weapon from you.”

  “You think so?” McErlain smiled, showing uneven but very white teeth, and Surgenor suddenly became aware of him as a human being instead of as a cutout military figure. The two uniformed men faced each other in the jungle’s sweltering silence. Watching the brilliantly-lit tableau, Surgenor felt his attention distracted by a curious irrelevancy. There was an incongruity somewhere. There was something strangely out of place, or lacking, about the whole primeval scene. . . .

  The Paladorian made a hissing sound and sat upright with deliberate, painful movements. McErlain went towards her and with an abrupt movement threw the gray cowl back from her head. Surgenor felt an odd sense of wonder as he saw the alien face in bright, uncompromising light. The vague glimpse he had caught in the darkness of the module had left him with an impression not of beauty, yet of some degree of compatibility with human standards of beauty. In the fierce sunlight there was no disguising the fact that her nose was a shapeless mound, that her eyes were considerably smaller than a human’s, or that her black hair was so coarse that the individual strands gleamed separately like enameled wire. For all that, he thought, there’s no doubt that this is a female. Can there be a cosmic female principle which makes itself obvious at first glance, even to an alien? Surgenor felt momentarily uncomfortable as he realized he had thought of himself as the alien.

  Further plaintive sounds came from the Paladorian’s dry-lipped mouth as she turned her head from side to side, her plum-colored eyes flicking over the four men and the background of jungle.

  “Go ahead, sergeant,” Giyani said sardonically. “Interrogate the prisoner and find out how to travel a million years into the future.”

  Surgenor turned to him. “Have we anything at all on the Paladorian language?”

  “Not a word. In fact, we don’t even know if they employ words—it might be one of those continuously inflected hums or buzzes like they use on . . .” He stopped speaking as the alien female got to her feet and stood swaying slightly, her pale skin glistening with oil.

  “She keeps looking back that way,” Lieutenant Kelvin said loudly, pointing down the trail of shattered and uprooted vegetation in the direction from which the module had come. He ran a few paces along the trail with an eager, boyish lope. “Major! There’s something back there. A tunnel or something.”

  “Impossible,” Surgenor said instinctively, but he stepped up on a tree trunk and shaded his eyes against the sun. At the far end of the trail he picked out a circular area of blackness. It looked like the mouth of a cave, except that there was no visible background of hillside.

  “I’m going to have a look.” Kelvin’s tall, spare figure bounded away from the group.

  “Lieutenant!” Giyani spoke crisply, assuming command again after his inconclusive brush with McErlain. “We’ll go together.” He looked directly at the Paladorian, then pointed down the trail. She appeared to understand at once and began walking, gathering the skirts of her robe exactly as an Earth woman would have done it. McErlain fell in behind her with his rifle. Surgenor, walking beside the sergeant, noted that the Paladorian seemed to be moving with difficulty, almost as if she was ill, but with a subtle difference.

  “Major,” he called, “we don’t need any military security here—how did you know in advance that the prisoner would be a pregnant female?”

  “Our central data processing unit worked it out after analysing all the observations from the scanner satellites. The natives are generally much slimmer and more mobile than this one.”

  “I see.” Surgenor got a disturbing thought—at any minute they could be faced with the daunting task of having to deliver an alien child, with absolutely no facilities. “So why did we have to go for one that was pregnant?”

  “When I said they are less mobile I was using the word in the full context of this planet.” Giyani fell back beside Surgenor and offered him a cigarette which he accepted gratefully. “The scanner records show that pregnant natives don’t flit through time as easily as the others. They materialize solidly, fully into the present, and when they’ve done it they stay around longer. It seems harder for them to vanish.”

  “Why should that be?”

  Giyani shrugged and blew out a plume of smoke. “Who knows? If it’s all done by mental control, as it seems to be, perhaps the presence of another mind right inside her own body ties the female down a bit. We’d never have caught this one otherwise.”

  Surgenor stepped carefully around a tree stump. “That’s the other thing I don’t understand. If the Paladorians are so anxious to avoid contact, why did they let vulnerable females into a sector of space-time occupied by us?”

  “That’s another good question, David. I wish I knew the answer. Has it occurred to you that their control over time may not be absolute, just the way our grip over normal space isn’t perfect? Since we landed on Palador some of our intellectual types on the ship have been claiming the natives have proved that the past, present and future are coexistent. All right—they may be, if you look at them from the right angle—but suppose the ‘present’ is still more important than the other two in some way. It might be a wave crest which drags the females along with it when they are ready to give birth. Maybe the fetus is tied to the ‘present’ because it hasn’t learned the mental disciplines, or . . .

  “What’s the point in going over all this theoretical stuff?” Giyani demanded, checking his own expansiveness. “It doesn’t change anything.”

  Surgenor nodded thoughtfully, revising his assessment of Giyani. He had guessed that the major was an intelligent man walking into danger with his eyes open, but he had been guilty—as with McErlain—of regarding him as just another military stereotype with a closed, inflexible mind. His talk with Giyani had been instructive in more ways than one. Surgenor got a brief, clear view of what lay ahead and stopped thinking about the major.

  A night-black disc about three meters in diameter was floating in the air, its lower edge a short distance above the ground. Its edges were blurred, shimmering, and when Surgenor drew closer he saw that the blackness of the disc was relieved by the intense glitter of stars.

  The robed figure of the Paladorian lurched forward two paces, and stopped. McErlain moved in between her and the black disc and forced her to move away from it.

  “Keep her there, sergeant.” Giyani’s voice was soft. “We may be back in time for breakfast, after all.”

  “This is what she was looking for,” Lieutenant Kelvin said. “I’ll bet it’s a kind of lifeline. That’s our own time through there.”

  Surgenor shaded his eyes and peered upwards into the disc. The stars within did look exactly like those he had last seen wheeling above the Paladorian desert in the 23rd Century A.D. He shivered, then noticed that a gentle breeze was playing on his back. The air currents appeared to be moving in the direction of the strange disc. He began to pick
his way through the stand of undamaged vegetation which separated the end of the gouged-out trail from the circle of jet blackness.

  “What are you doing, David?” Giyani said alertly.

  “Just carrying out a little experiment.” Surgenor got closer to the disc, the lower edge of which was just above his head. He drew deeply on his cigarette and blew the smoke upwards. It traveled vertically for a short distance and was sucked into the blackness. He threw the remainder of the cigarette after it. The white cylinder gleamed briefly in the sunlight before vanishing, and did not complete its trajectory on the other side of the disc.

  “Pressure differential,” he said, rejoining the group. “The warm air is flowing through that hole. Into the future, I guess.” He, Giyani and Kelvin forced their way through the vegetation until they were on the other side of the disc, but from that viewpoint it was nonexistent. There was nothing to see but McErlain impassively facing the Paladorian with his rifle lying in the crook of his arm. Giyani took a coin from his pocket and threw it in a glittering arc which took it through the disc’s estimated position. The coin fell to the ground near the sergeant.