The Fury Out of Time Read online

  It was altogether lovely, and it was unhurried. It offered the illusion of permanence. One could look away or close one’s eyes with the certitude that the beauty would be unchanged when one looked again.

  The afternoon wore on slowly. There were seven empty pop bottles on the table and the sun hung low over the distant valley rim when Karvel closed his eyes and opened them just in time to see, far off in the valley, a solitary tree falling.

  Even on that wind-blown autumn afternoon the event was incongruous, but it made no immediate impression on his consciousness. Then a dozen trees of a row that lined the stream were toppled, and that brought Karvel to his feet. Afterward he had no recollection of shouting, but a moment later Bert Whistler was beside him, and Karvel could only point silently.

  Trees continued to fall, in a widening circle. Half of a small wood lot went down, and a flick of an eye later the abandoned barn across the valley disintegrated into splinters.

  “What is it?” Whistler demanded.

  Karvel shook his head. The path of destruction was spiraling outward with incredible speed, cutting an ever-widening swath and at the same time leaving a widening spiral untouched. Beyond an undamaged grove of trees a silo top vanished abruptly. Karvel strained to see what had happened to the farm buildings, but the grove screened them.

  Trees continued to fall. A herd of cattle was bowled over, and an instant later the destruction reached the distant rim of the valley and sliced through the Mueller farm. The barn collapsed, the house dissolved in a cloud of erupting brick. Outbuildings and a concrete silo were untouched.

  “It’s coming closer each time around,” Karvel said to Whistler. “It’ll be here in a moment. Better get everyone into the basement.”

  Whistler gawked at him wildly and turned away muttering to himself. “Crazy! A tornado in this weather!”

  The screen of young pines at the left of the garden suddenly bent to the ground, and an invisible force smashed into Karvel. He lay twenty feet from where he had been standing, dazed and bleeding. The table, minus its umbrella and bottles, was spinning away down into the valley. The tavern was untouched.

  Whistler waddled over to help him to his feet. “Crazy tornado,” Whistler said. “Didn’t even hear anything. You all right?”

  Karvel did not answer. The pain in his chest sharpened to agony when he inhaled. He had the impression that his good left leg had been torn from its socket at the knee, and his various aches were too numerous and well-distributed for inventory. He dabbed at the moisture on his face with his handkerchief and identified it as blood.

  “Your head’s bleeding,” Whistler said unnecessarily. “Can you walk?”

  “Let’s try,” Karvel said.

  With Whistler’s support he made his way around the building to the parking lot. Every step and every breath was genuinely exquisite torment, but he noted wryly that the law of compensation was still operating. The intense pain in his left knee had absolutely cured the limp in his artificial right leg.

  Far up the road a pickup truck had veered into the ditch. A carload of airmen had pulled into the parking lot a moment before, and Karvel pointed and snapped an order. “See if anyone’s hurt.” With Whistler’s sturdy figure still supporting him, Karvel turned toward the tavern. Just inside the door was a pay telephone. He fed a coin into it and found to his surprise that it was working.

  He got through to Hatch Air Force Base and asked for the Combat Operations duty officer. “This is Major Bowden Karvel,” he said. “I’m calling from Whistler’s Country Tavern. I suggest an immediate base tornado alert.”

  “Tornado alert?” the officer repeated blankly.

  “I’d guess that you have five to ten minutes. Allow fifteen as a safe margin. If nothing has happened by then, it’s missed the base. Civilian and off-duty casualties will need all the medical personnel and equipment you can lay your hands on. Send whatever men are available to help clear away the wreckage. Most of the farms in the area are badly hit. We’ll need an officer to take charge—Hello!”

  The line had gone dead. Karvel hung up, and with Whistler’s help moved across the crowded room to the Officers’ Club. The sole occupants were Lieutenant Ostrander and his moose call. Ostrander was dreamily arranging empty beer bottles into a monogrammatic PO. Karvel cleared the table with a crashing gesture of disgust.

  “Take six men and get over to the Mueller farm. Look for survivors.”

  “Survivors, sir?” Ostrander’s youthful face assumed contortions of astonishment. “What the devil’s happened?”

  “Move!”

  Ostrander moved. Karvel pointed Whistler toward the main room and plucked the chief master sergeant from behind a bottle of beer.

  “I want every road in and around the valley checked carefully,” he said. “You may find cars wrecked, and you’ll find a lot of buildings flattened. Leave a rescue party wherever you think it’ll do any good. Use your own judgment. Send back reports on what you find, and let us know where medical supplies and ambulances are needed.”

  “What happened, Major?” the sergeant asked blankly.

  “Get moving, and you’ll find out.” Karvel turned to Whistler. “You may have to convert this place into a temporary hospital. Tell Ma what happened, and leave her in charge here. You get over to the base and try to convince someone that we’ve had a major disaster. That idiot in Combat Operations didn’t believe me. He’ll ask the weather officer, and the weather officer will say there couldn’t be a tornado today, and he’ll forget about it.”

  The parking lot was emptying rapidly when they got outside. Karvel saw Lieutenant Ostrander’s party off, and helped the sergeant get the main rescue force under way. Bert Whistler watched silently.

  “I been thinking, Major,” he said, as the last car pulled out. “It wasn’t no tornado. What was it?”

  “I don’t know.” Karvel moved toward his own car.

  “Your head’s still bleeding, and you really look awful. You better wait for one of them ambulances.”

  “I’m going to drive around by Mueller’s and come back up the valley road. You get over to the base and raise hell. Insist on seeing Colonel Frazier personally, and tell him I sent you. I have a hunch that a lot of lives are going to depend on how quickly we can get people out of smashed houses. You saw what happened to Mueller’s?”

  Whistler nodded, and helped him to get settled behind his steering wheel.

  “Can’t you bend your leg at all?” Whistler asked.

  Karvel shook his head impatiently.

  “Good thing you got hand controls,” Whistler said. He closed the door and stepped back, and Karvel drove away without a backward glance.

  At the Mueller farm he found Lieutenant Ostrander and his men working quickly and efficiently on the mound of brick that had been the house. A small body lay on the ground, partially covered by an Air Force blouse. “One of the younger kids,” Ostrander said. “The rest of the family’s either dead or unconscious. We haven’t heard a whisper.”

  The lieutenant was no longer the congenial buffoon with the moose call. He was pale and tense, but superbly competent. He snapped an order at two men who were trying to pry a rafter loose, and ran to help them.

  Karvel watched him approvingly. He would have to write a letter of appreciation for Lieutenant Phineas Ostrander— though he doubted that the base commander would believe it.

  He suppressed an impulse to go to their assistance. His knee was already badly swollen. He was certain that he had at least one fractured rib, and he found himself wincing in anticipation of the occasional deep breath his body demanded. The gash in his head continued to ooze blood. He’d left his jacket at Whistler’s, and at this end of the valley, no longer warmed by the setting sun, he soon felt shudderingly cold. He started his motor and turned on the heater.

  “There’s something I want to see while I can still hobble around,” he said, when Ostrander returned. “Carry on, you’re doing fine.”

  At the neighboring farm o
nly a corncrib had been damaged. Karvel sent the farmer and his three sons to help Ostrander, and drove on. Fallen trees partially blocked the road, but he managed to steer his car around them. He stopped once and painfully got out to examine a smashed car, but he paused only long enough to assure himself that the man, woman, and two children were all dead. He could not have gotten them out in any case—that would take torches or cutting tools.

  He turned onto the valley road, edged his car around more fallen trees, and kept a firm grip on the brake handle during the steep descent. Twice he stopped briefly to look about. The pall of death hung heavily over the mangled fields. Cattle lay in clusters, their entrails smashed from their flattened bodies. A car was parked where the road leveled off, and pale-faced airmen were at work about a shattered farmhouse. They had recovered two bodies. The fury had commenced near this farm, and the awesome record of its force challenged the imagination. Buildings were pulverized, and enormous old trees had been flung to the ground.

  A staff sergeant recognized Karvel and hurried over to report. Karvel waved him back to work. He pulled a piece of dead branch from a brush pile to use as a cane and limped haltingly across the road and into a pasture, pausing once to ponder the nature of a force that could snap fence posts and barbed wire. He reached the stream and splashed across it. Turning aside to avoid dead cattle and fallen trees, he moved painfully toward the first tree he had seen toppled.

  He sat down on it and gazed unbelievingly at the shredded trunk and the splintered edge of the stump from which it had been wrenched. He was still sitting there an hour later when Colonel Frazier, the Hatch Air Force Base commander, strode up accompanied by his wing intelligence officer, Major Wardle. The colonel asked him what the hell he thought he was doing, and Karvel shook his head and did not answer.

  He had seen the dullish-black sphere that rested in a hollow fifty feet away. It was some ten feet in diameter, and it had no more place in that quiet pasture than did the Empire State Building. Karvel had marveled at it, but he had been unable to investigate. By the time he’d reached the tree even a shallow breath was impaling him with pain, and he had the queasy feeling that he might pass out if he ventured one more step on his injured leg.

  But he had found something close by that piqued his curiosity at least as much as the sphere. It was a butterfly, a tiny thing no larger than his thumbnail, that had alighted on the tree beside him. Karvel captured it before it could fly away, and he was still staring at it when the colonel arrived.

  If the sphere was an improbable ornament to a rural landscape, this butterfly was a flat impossibility.

  Chapter 2

  Gerald Haskins sat quietly in a corner of Colonel Frazier’s office, chair tilted back against the wall, and puffed on a cigar. The colonels were arguing again, but Haskins was paying very little attention to them. He was really interested in only two kinds of people—those who could tell him what he wanted to know, and those who could do something he wanted done. These officers could not qualify on either count, but this neither surprised nor disappointed him. High-ranking officers were rarely of any value to Gerald Haskins, except in helping him to find the kinds of people who interested him.

  He had flown out from Washington with two of them, Colonel Harlow Stubbins of Air Force Intelligence, and an Army Intelligence officer, Colonel James Rogers. Colonel Frazier had immediately taken them on a prolonged tramp about the countryside, and Haskins’s feet hurt. He did not resent this, but he doubted that it had been necessary. He was marking time until some of the people who interested him were ready to tell him something. Then—perhaps—he could decide what he wanted done.

  Colonel Stubbins said peevishly, “I’m not going to be stampeded into any conclusions until I’ve had a talk with your Major Karvel.”

  Colonel Frazier nodded agreement. “As you say, he is the most important eyewitness. I’ll warn you, though, that an interview with him isn’t going to clear up anything. Quite the contrary.”

  The army colonel, who was displaying the reticence military etiquette seemed to demand of a guest in an alien domain, entered a mild protest. “You said he was a good man.”

  “A very good man,” Colonel Frazier said. “I don’t think he’s ever had a commander who called him anything but brilliant. He’ll describe what he saw, and describe it very well, but even a good description is not an explanation.”

  Haskins leaned forward. The front legs of his chair struck the floor with a thump that produced a trio of irritated scowls. “I’d like to see Major Karvel’s 201 file.”

  “I don’t have it,” Colonel Frazier told him.

  “The man is stationed at this base, and you don’t have—”

  “He isn’t stationed here. He’s a retired officer—disability retired. It’s a tragic story. He was one of the new group of astronauts, and doing a tremendous job, as everyone who knew him expected. Then he got involved in a freak auto accident. Rather, he took to the ditch to avoid piling into an accident that had already taken place. He saved several lives, which I hope is some consolation to him because he lost a leg. Naturally NASA isn’t going to put a one-legged man on the moon, and our medical boards even take a dim view of one-legged men flying jets. Karvel could have had a responsible desk job with either NASA or the Air Force, but he refused. He’s just not the desk type. I suppose you’d say he couldn’t stand it to stay in the Air Force, but once he got out he couldn’t stay away from it. He’s been living in a nearby trailer camp, and I’m very much afraid he’s gotten himself onto a nonreversible treadmill to Hell. It’s a damned shame.”

  Haskins broke off the twitch of suspicion he’d felt, and filed it. “Where is his 201 file?”

  “At the Air Reserve Record Center, in Denver.”

  “I’d like to skin your medical officer,” Colonel Stubbins said. “Why the devil did he have to operate this morning?”

  Colonel Frazier smiled. “It didn’t occur to me to ask. The last time I questioned the judgment of a doctor was when I was a second lieutenant. It was also the first time. I learned—”

  “I didn’t have to learn not to argue with a doctor,” Colonel Stubbins growled. “Nevertheless, what happened yesterday may be at least as important as what happened at Hiroshima back in 1945, and I don’t like having to sit here waiting for someone to tell me when I can talk to the one man who knows anything about it.”

  “As far as Colonel Vukin is concerned, the only important consideration was that Karvel was badly injured and in considerable pain.”

  “What sort of operation?” Haskins asked.

  “Medial collateral ligament damage,” Frazier said. “In the knee. If you know what that means—I don’t. Karvel also had three broken ribs and a bad cut on the head, with a concussion. And an assortment of bad bruises. I suppose they sewed up his head. I don’t know what the ribs and the bruises required. According to Vukin, his principal means of transportation is going to be a wheel chair for some time to come. His left knee will be in a cast, and he won’t be able to use crutches because of the broken ribs. The amazing thing is how he accomplished as much as he did, considering the condition he was in. Vukin says the ribs alone should have made him a stretcher case.”

  “All the more reason why we should see him as soon as possible,” Stubbins said. “The knock on the head didn’t impair his thinking?”

  “No. He was his usual brilliant self right up to the moment Vukin put him under with an injection of something. The crew of surveyors was his idea. He thought the path of destruction was a perfect spiral, with that damned sphere—”

  “Unidentified object,” Colonel Rogers murmured.

  “—with the U.O. at dead center, and up to the last report he was absolutely right.”

  “You should have questioned him when you had a chance,” Stubbins said.

  “I told you he gave me a detailed description of what he saw. Force X travels with incredible speed. It forms a widening spiral with a widening gap. It knocks down trees and smashes building
s—as we saw. It makes no noise, and it’s invisible. Whistler told us almost as much, and none of it helps us to deduce what Force X is.”

  Stubbins lifted his hands helplessly. “Let’s go down to Hangar Seven.”

  The other colonels nodded, and got to their feet. Haskins remained seated, thoughtfully contemplating the stub of his cigar. “I’d like to make a phone call,” he said.

  “Go ahead,” Colonel Frazier said, donating the office with a sweep of his hand.

  “I’ll be along in a moment,” Haskins said.

  He waited until the door closed after them, and then he went to the desk and gave the switchboard operator a Washington, D.C., number. When he reached his party he did not waste words. “Major Bowden Karvel.” He spelled it. “U. S. Air Force, disability retired. The works.”

  Gerald Haskins had his own practical outlook on the general fitness of things, and “unidentified object” seemed a ridiculous misnomer for the heavily guarded sphere in Hangar Seven. To have a piece of apparatus securely enough in hand to commence dissecting it, and still be unable to label it with anything more aptly descriptive than U.O., was the height of military futility. He was happy that the dissecting was being done by his own bright young men, who were carefully drawn from the two kinds of people who interested him.

  Hangar Seven was a small maintenance hangar, but its drafty dimensions still dwarfed the unidentified object into illusory insignificance. The sphere rested approximately in the center of the hangar, surrounded by workbenches, laboratory equipment, and seventeen puzzled scientists.

  Colonel Stubbins strode up to the nearest bench and demanded, “Got anything yet?”

  The scientists looked up at him, not startled but quietly disdainful, and unanimously decided to ignore him. Haskins kept his amusement to himself, wondering if soldiers would never learn that civilian is not necessarily a military rank below private.

  He stopped to talk with a young scientist who seemed fascinated by a thick cylindrical object. “The controls?” he asked.