Jack Williamson The Legion of Time

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Beneath, upon the denuded wastelands where fields and villages had been, was a
desolate untrodden wilderness of weeds and brush, leprously patched with
strange scars of white, shining ash.
"Gyronchi?" breathed Lanning. "Destroyed?"
"Destroyed," rasped Wil McLan, "by its own evil. By a final war between
Sorainya's half-human warriors and the priesthood of the gyrane.
Mankind, hi the picture you witness, is extinct."
His hoarse whisper sank very low.
"If we fail if mankind follows the way of Gyronchi that is the end of the
road." Wearily, he snapped off the switch, and the bleak scene vanished. "And
now it seems that the road has been chosen. For no other geodesies remain
strong enough for the instrument to trace."
His hands knotted impotently, Lanning stared blankly out through the dome,
into the haze of flickering blue.
"What " he demanded. "What could have happened?"
"I don't know." Wil McLan shook his head. "We must try to find what Sorainya
has done, and try to undo it. If we could get back to Jonbar, and Lethonee's
Page 25
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
new geodesic laboratory "
Lanning gripped his thin shoulder. "Can we?"
"I'm afraid," whispered Wil McLan, "that this move has so far undermined the
probability of Jonbar that we can never reach it. But we can try!"
And the broken old hands spun the wheel of the
Chronion.
a apter 8
THE VANISHING OF JONBAR
BORIS BARININ CAME UP from the hospital ward. Two Canadians followed: lean
silent twins named Isaac and Israel
Enders, who had been snatched from a shell hole on Vimy Ridge in 1917. With
Duffy Clark, the British sailor from
Jutland, they made eleven men under Lanning. He organized them into two
squads, made Emil Schorn his second in command.
Wil McLan had been collecting weapons. There were a dozen Mauser rifles, two
dozen Luger pistols, four crated machine guns, several boxes of hand grenades,
and a hundred thousand rounds of assorted ammunition, that all had come, along
with a stock of food and a few medical supplies, from a sinking munitions
ship.
"The first precaution," McLan told him. "We located a torpedoed ship, when we
first came back from Jonbar, to collect supplies and arms and test our
technique of recovery. Weapons from Jonbar, you see, wouldn't function against
targets from Gyronchi."
Since McLan's helpers from Jonbar would be unable to enter Gyronchi, Lanning
detailed Clark, Barinin, and Willie
Rand as a crew for the
Chronion, and himself learned something of her navigation, as the time ship
drove steadily down the geodesies of Jonbar. The hydrogen converter throbbed
endlessly beneath the deck, but Wil McLan seemed disheartened with their
progress.
"The world we seek is now all but impossible," he rasped. "The full power of
the field drives us forward very slowly.
And at any instant the geodesies of Jonbar may break, for they are weak enough
already, and leave us nowhere!"
Once, in his tiny cabin, aft, Lanning woke in his bunk with a clear memory of
Lethonee. Slim and tall in her
49
50
The
Legion of Time long white robe, she had stood before him, holding the flaming
jewel of time. Despair was a shadow on her face, and her violet eyes were dark
pools of pain.
"Denny," her urgent words rang clear in his memory, "come to Jonbar or we are
dead."
Lanning went at once to the bridge, and told McLan. The old man shook his
white head, grimly.
"We are already doing all that can be done," he said. "The geodesies of Jonbar
are like microscopic wires drawn out thinner and thinner by the attenuation of
probability. If the tracer loses them, or if they snap, Jonbar is lost!"
Two weeks passed, by the time of the ship physiological time, as measured by
heartbeats and all bodily rhythms, in which life ran on toward its end,
regardless of motion backward or forward along the time dimension. And at last
the
Chronion slipped silently out of the blue, shimmering abyss. Lanning, waiting
eagerly on the deck, saw beneath them Jonbar!
The ship was two miles high. Yet, that metropolis of futurity stretched out in
every direction as far as he could see.
Page 26
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Mirror-faced with polished metal, the soaring buildings seemed more inspiring
than cathedrals. With a pleasing lack of regularity, they stood far apart all
across the green park-like valley of a broad placid river, and crowned the
wooded hills beyond. Many-leveled traffic viaducts flowed among them, busy
with strange vehicles. Great silver teardrops came and went through the air
about them.
Lanning had glimpsed the city once before, through Lethonee's time jewel; now
its staggering vastness touched him with a troubled awe. Hundreds of millions,
he knew, lived here in this heart-lifting splendor. Yet all the wonder of this
world, the cruel fact came home to him like a stabbing blade, faced absolute
annihilation.
Trembling with eagerness and dread, he hurried up to Wil McLan.
"So Jonbar's safe?" he whispered breathlessly. "And Lethonee is here?"
The bent old man turned solemnly from the polished wheel, and shook his
scarred white head.
"We're here," came his voiceless answer. "But our
The Vanishing of Jonbar
51
instruments show how its geodesies have faded out. It hangs by a strand weaker
than a spider's web. But Lethonee will doubtless be at her new laboratory."
The
Chronion was gliding swiftly to one tall silver spire on a hill. A vast
doorway slid open in a silvery wall. The little ship floated into an immense
hangar-like space, crowded with streamlined craft. A green light beckoned them
to an empty platform.
"This is the world we're fighting for," Lanning told the men.
"Ach!"
rumbled Emil Schorn. "A good world."
Leaving the scarred Prussian in command, and warning him to be ready for
instant action in case of emergency, Lanning and McLan left the ship. An
elevator in a great pillar shot them upward. They emerged into cool open air,
amid the fragrant greenery of a terrace garden. A sliding door opened in a
bright wall beyond. Out of it came Lethonee.
Instead of the long white robe in which Lanning had always seen her, she wore [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Linki