THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY Read online

  “Hurt! My God!” said Red with bitterness. “Two miles not far! Look! Look at this!”

  He made a violent gesture, and pulled up the leg of his trousers. The sun glinted blindingly on a shaft of polished metal.

  Chantal fell silent. Burma, screwing up his eyes against the light, stared at the prosthetic leg for a long while.

  “I’m very sorry, Red,” he said at length. “I did not know. But I am too ill to undo what has been done. I promise that—if you still so wish—you will be returned to your time the moment I am safe and well.”

  He opened his eyes full and gazed at Red. “You cannot understand the importance of what is happening, but I give you my word that I must reach help if a terrible disaster is to be avoided. I throw myself on your mercy. I will not command you to go.”

  As Red stood hesitant, his anger fading, a flash of incredible light made the sunshine turn to shadow, and after a moment was followed by a sound like a million claps of thunder rolled into one.

  “What—what is happening?” Red asked. Burma looked at him steadily.

  “We are losing a war,” he said. “The human race is losing a war.”

  IV

  There was a ship. She was found silent and abandoned in mid-ocean—fires burning, tables laid, but crewless and adrift. Her name was the Marie Celeste.

  Scientists in Capetown (reported Reuters) were forced to admit that the beast brought in by the Hargreaves Halliday was a prehistoric trachodontid in freshly killed condition. This raises the possibility of an isolated island in the Indian Ocean where…

  Geelong, Australia: Found wandering near here today, a man claims to be prominent Los Angeles businessman Willis D. Wright, reported missing two days ago from his home…

  Magwareet looked at the suddenly drawn faces of the men with him. Apprehensively, they half-turned to keep the surrounding area in view.

  “What could it be?” said Inassul.

  “I don’t know. Is the communication equipment in order, somebody?”

  A tall man standing near that panel gave a swift glance at the dials and flicked down a bank of switches. The sound of Centre’s never-ceasing random scramble broadcast filled the air for a moment. “It’s working,” he said.

  Magwareet shouldered his way over and pressed the call button to bring in Artesha. “Have we an expert on the biology of 129 Lyrae?” he demanded.

  “I’ll find out. What do you want one for?”

  Magwareet explained briefly. “We’ll have to get rid of—whatever it was—before we dare risk the rescue crews coming in.”

  “Magwareet!” she said sharply. “You aren’t thinking of going after it yourself?”

  “Don’t be silly, Artesha. Without accurate data, there will have to be a co-ordinator directing the search.” He tried to deny to himself that his real reason was a desire for action that he himself could see the result of.

  Artesha went on, arguing against it, but there was a sigh from the circle of men, and in the silence when she stopped speaking for a moment, a heavy scratching sound came to them. They waited. Inassul moved to look through the gap torn in the wall. Excitedly, he beckoned.

  “Only we won’t have to go in search of it,” countered Magwareet softly. “It’s coming to look for us…”

  They drew back, their weapons in their hands. Someone said something when the tension grew intolerable and at once the scratching sound changed—was here!

  Something gigantic and powerful smashed down the wall at a different point, bringing the panels of the roof falling in a welter of plastic and a tangle of wiring. A man screamed, and sprawled with his scalp cut across. They had a glimpse of a creature slate-blue and glistening. Then a weapon hissed, and a bolt of energy seared the edge of the gap.

  As they flinched from the brilliance, a stench filled the air like something rotting, and the beast tossed in agony. It turned and crashed away through a nearby building.

  “I got it!” yelled the man who had fired. Magwareet snapped into action.

  “Got it be damned! It’s hurt, and gone wild! We must get after it before it does more damage. Inassul, tell Centre what’s happened, and the rest of you follow me.”

  There was no chance of losing the beast’s trail. It had blundered against a building at the corner of one of the streets joining the plaza, and then continued along the roadway, striking at anything and everything in frenzy. Power lines were torn down, walls dented, signs tossed in the air and lighting broken.

  They went after it at a dead run.

  What kind of a beast is this? Magwareet found himself wondering. It was gigantic, and incredibly strong. Had it been picked up when they rooted out the city’s foundations, lain dormant until driven crazy by the strain of the interstellar drive?

  He wished that the spin on the city hadn’t thrown everything not fastened down aside, and thus wrecked all the cars which were littered against the buildings. He had no way of telling whether they were losing to or gaining on their quarry.

  “It’s probably heading for home!” he shouted to encourage his companions. “It won’t be far now.”

  “We passed a park where the ground had been torn up,” panted someone alongside him. “We took it for where something had been installed underground. I think it might have come from underground!”

  “They wouldn’t have brought it in the zoo,” Magwareet yelled in answer. “Far from here?”

  “Another half mile!” the man told him.

  And in another few minutes they found themselves on the outskirts of an open space, where stacks of supplies that might be useful here in the Solar System had been piled. The track of the beast through them was twenty feet wide.

  There, in a patch of broken trees, they found a burrow that slanted downwards steeply; the earth around it was freshly turned. From its mouth the stench of putrefaction poured like steam.

  “Find out if the park is walled off below the surface!” Magwareet rapped, and men broke away to check. The chances were good that the park was a miniature ecological unit, set in a basin of concrete, but there was no telling whether the beast might not be strong enough to break through.

  In a while, the men returned, and reported that though there was a subsoil barrier, it extended only as far as the heavy bed of clay a couple of hundred feet under them. But one of them had passed a stack of subsonic detectors on his way, and had brought one of the instruments back with him.

  Handling it with skill, he turned around to let the stream of pulses from its generator filter into the ground. In an astonished tone, he said, “The ground’s riddled with tunnels! Look here—you can see them showing up when the sound bounces off the walls. This hole leads into a maze.”

  Magwareet weighed the chances of finding the beast in its warren against the risk of having it recover and break out to wreak fresh havoc. There was only one possible decision—so he made it.

  “Disperse through the park!” he rapped, hoping that the beast would not burrow up and come out somewhere else—but it was stupid to think of guarding the whole city with the few men he had. “But I want a volunteer to come down with me and see if we can find the thing!”

  There were shouts, and several men stepped forward grimly, but Magwareet chose the man who had had the intelligence to realise a subsonic detector would be of use. He asked his name, and was told Tifara.

  “Well, Tifara, this is a damnfool thing to do—but it has to be done. If we flush the beast,” he added, looking round, “and it breaks out again, kill it. Immediately! And let me know as quickly as possible. All right, Tifara—let’s go.”

  They stepped over the edge of the huge burrow and began to walk gingerly down.

  The going was difficult, and the stench overpowering. After a little way, Magwareet closed the helmet of his spacesuit and breathed his canned air to escape it. Their lights made the rough walls crawl with eerie shadows.

  “I think the beast must be bleeding,” said Tifara after a while. “Look—the ground is smeared with so
mething slimy. That’s why it’s slippery.”

  “Good,” nodded Magwareet. “That’ll weaken it. I hope it hasn’t gone too far… This must be its only burrow to the surface. I expect it was driven out by fear when the interstellar drive started up.”

  They went on in silence. Magwareet had to force himself not to slow down automatically through over-caution—time was running out, and they did not know how badly the beast was hurt.

  They were sixty-odd feet below the surface when they came to the first parting of the ways. They looked for signs of the slimy ichor the creature was losing, and found them in only one of the two tunnels, so they followed it.

  “It’s bleeding less heavily,” said Magwareet. “I only hope it doesn’t stop altogether.”

  But the trail thinned and grew more scattered, until they sometimes had to go five or ten yards before coming across another drop. The next time the ways parted, they had seen no ichor for some distance.

  Flashing his light down each passage in turn, Magwareet could make out no obvious sign of which to choose. “Go a few yards along that one,” he instructed Tifara. “If you find any spoor, come back at once. I’ll try this way.”

  Tifara nodded, and went out of sight. Magwareet stepped boldly forward, and discovered that after ten yards his branch of the tunnel bent sharply. The roof got lower, too, and then dropped abruptly to meet the floor.

  Puzzled, he flashed his light up and down, wondering why the dead end.

  Stones and earth rattled about his ears; he flinched and turned to run, fearing a roof-fall, and…

  For an instant he knew pure, paralysing fear. There was no longer a tunnel before him. Instead, a flat slate-blue surface glistened wetly in the light of his lamp.

  So, like it or not, he had found the beast.

  But it did not move again, and when he swung his lamp over it, he saw that there was a gash in one of its thick, flexible limbs where the earlier shot had struck home. It had simply fallen in the tunnel, and writhed with its last strength to cut off his exit.

  There was a simple way out, at least. He felt for the weapon at his side and turned the power control over to violent preparatory to cutting a hole through its body. If it moved anything like a Terrestrial creature, he was facing its belly; the soil smeared over most of its skin accounted for his not having noticed it at once.

  A cry came from the other side. “Magwareet! Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” Magwareet shouted back. “Stand clear—I may have to burn a way through.”

  “Is it dead?”

  “It soon will be if it isn’t,” Magwareet answered grimly. It was not until the words were uttered that he realised the speaker was not Tifara. Faint, excited words filtered through to him.

  Then someone cried in a passionate tone, “Don’t shoot, Magwareet! Don’t shoot!”

  “What—?”

  “Don’t shoot,” the speaker insisted. “This isn’t an animal from 129 Lyrae!”

  “Who are you?”

  “Kepthin! I’m a biologist. Somebody sent for me. This isn’t from 129 Lyrae, don’t you understand?”

  “What’s that got to do with it. Am I to stay here for good?”

  “We’ll get you out in a moment,” came the faint reply. Then there was buzzing in which he could hear no meaning. Fuming, Magwareet paced the little area he had, wondering what was going on. After half an hour, his patience could hold out no longer.

  He walked rapidly to the beast’s body and was filling his lungs to yell at the people he could still hear moving beyond, when he noticed something he had not realised before.

  What he had taken for a chitinous carapace on the animal was torn around the great wound in its limb, and in the lamplight he could see the shiny gleam of metal.

  Astonished, he rapped tentatively on the slate-blue surface. It sounded hollow at several places. A fantastic suspicion filled his mind.

  Rasping and scraping broke in on his thoughts, and over the prone body of the beast a power shovel tore away the roof of the tunnel. As soon as the gap was wide enough for Magwareet to pass, the operator withdrew it to let him scramble through.

  On the far side he found Inassul, Tifara, and a small man with excited eyes whom he knew must be Kepthin, with a group of other people, all violently agitated.

  “Glad you’re safe!” said Tifara. “Magwareet, you’ve no idea what’s happened! This is incredible—”

  “As soon as I realised this animal wasn’t Lyran, I had all work stopped,” Kepthin broke in. “But I didn’t suspect what we would discover. It’s alive, too, as far as we can tell at least, it has a circulatory system and that’s still going. But we never suspected—”

  “Suspected what?” said Magwareet in a deflating tone, an extreme contrast to Kepthin’s enthusiasm. “That this damned thing is wearing a spacesuit, and therefore is probably the first living specimen of the Enemy to enter the Solar System?”

  “Well—yes,” said Kepthin, disappointed. “But isn’t it wonderful?”

  “No. It’s terrifying. If one could get in this way, why not others? Are our defences no good? Are we going to find millions of these things suddenly among us?” Magwareet felt sweat break out all over him.

  Then his communicator came on, and he heard Artesha’s voice. “Magwareet! They’ve found Burma—he made it back.”

  “I’m so glad,” said Magwareet sincerely. Poor Artesha, he thought—she must have suffered hell for a while.

  “Come back to Centre at once. What he tells us is awful. He’s been clear back to the twentieth century, and he says from back there the continuum looks as if temporal surges are breaking out everywhere. If this goes on, the Being is liable to tear itself out of this period altogether and start disturbing the whole history of Earth!”

  V

  There was a toy horse. It was the only plaything of a boy who could not talk, but who knew his name, which was Kaspar Hauser.

  Centre to all units, triple red emergency: New peaks developing (twenty-one dates further back in history than ever before).

  Mogak, Lord of the Plains, Son of the Running Horse, Paramount Chief under the Supreme Ruler of the Mertchakulun Bands, to His Most Sublime Omnipotence the Emperor of the Croceraunian Empire which stretches from dawn even unto nightfall (by courier): Miracles are abroad in the land!

  After the first few minutes, the journey took on the air of a sort of challenge to Red. He had not attempted such a walk since he lost his leg as a child. At that time, he had counted it a triumph to be able to walk a level street and appear only to have a sprained ankle. But this was different.

  The heat made sweat crawl in rivulets out of his hair, and the coarse dry sand found its way into his shoes until his good foot felt as if the bottom was being scraped with hot needles. The glare blinded him, the dust choked him, the irregular rocky surface made him lose his footing, but he got up again, cursing, and carried on.

  Then the socket of his prosthetic limb started to chafe, and grew unbearable. After nearly a mile, he stopped to take it off and line it with his handkerchief, but the relief that gave lasted only a short distance, and he set his jaw against the agony.

  It felt like an eternity before he stood up on a rocky outcrop and looked down across a valley alive with men.

  There was a—building? Not quite. It had a naked appearance, as though it was all functional and purposive, without decorative cover. About it, huge shining machines went very quietly about their business, and men in coveralls, seeming not to mind the heat and light, attended to them.

  Staggering, he started to descend the slope, shouting.

  His call attracted attention at once. Two men working not far away broke off and answered in the same incomprehensible language Burma had used in delirium.

  “Help!” Red called. “Here! Come here!”

  After momentary hesitation, one of them did. Approaching, he studied Red’s clothes with astonishment, waiting.

  “Do you speak English?” Red demanded. T
he man nodded.

  “Little,” he said. “You—from somewhere else?”

  “I’m from 1957!” said Red, feeling suddenly worn out.

  “You un’erstan’ time move?” the man said in astonishment. “You know how?”

  “Two miles back that way there’s a guy called Burma. He’s one of your people. He brought me here. He’s ill. He wants help.”

  The other shook his head in dismay. By this time, they had attracted more notice, and to the accompaniment of a faint hum an aircraft of some sort hovering above the valley turned towards where they stood. Its pilot, though, seemed to see something while dropping, and hesitated fifty feet up before bringing the craft swiftly to earth.

  A door slid back and a stout woman got out. She rapped two short sentences at Red’s companion, received an answer, and then looked at Red.

  “You know you’re not in your own time,” she said in English that was fluent but badly accented. “How?”

  Red sat down on a rock at hand and waved back the way he had come. “Ask a guy called Burma. He knows all the answers. You’ll find him two miles back there.”

  The woman nodded, spoke again in her own language, and without more ado took her aircraft away in the direction Red indicated. As it rose, Red grew suddenly aware that the man remaining behind had drawn a snub-nosed weapon and was levelling it at him.

  “What—” he began, but a spray of mist from the muzzle enveloped him, stinging his eyes and nose. He cried out. Before he had time to get furious, he saw that the man had turned it on himself also.

  “Is to make clean,” the man explained haltingly. “You from other time, have other—”

  As the man hunted for the word, Red felt the stinging die down, and with it a dozen unnoticed aches and pains, and a mild catarrh which had bothered him for several days. He nodded to show he understood, and wondered what incredible brew of medicaments could be in that fine spray.