The Fury Out of Time Page 7

  Another imaginary compass reading, and they turned south into Oklahoma and then Texas, with Ostrander’s face behind them and Karvel’s personal range of mountains filling the horizon.

  “If you aren’t going to drink, why are we spending all this time in bars?” Karvel asked impatiently.

  “I like to watch bartenders work. I been studying them all my life, everywhere I go. The good ones, they got a philosophy, and no two of ‘em work just alike.”

  “There can’t be that many ways to pour a glass of beer.”

  “You’re thinking about the mechanics. The philosophy is how you treat your customers. Look at this guy. He flatters everybody. Me, I give ‘em insults. It don’t matter as long as it’s genuine. Even a drunk customer can see through a phoney philosophy.”

  “This comes as a shock. I’ve never thought of you as a philosopher.”

  “That’s ‘cause I’m so good at it,” Whistler said.

  They drove west across New Mexico and into Arizona, and finally rented space in a trailer camp in Tucson. For a week Whistler visited bars, and Karvel soaked up sunshine and asked himself what he could have done to keep Ostrander from trying one more switch, and both of them became so bored that they stopped insulting each other. Then, late one night, Gerald Haskins came knocking at their trailer door.

  He handed Karvel his briefcase as casually as though they had parted two minutes before. “Hold the door,” he said, and was back a moment later with a motion picture projector and a screen.

  “Goody!” Whistler said. “Movies.”

  “We have another U.O.,” Haskins said.

  “Ostrander?” Karvel asked quickly.

  Haskins shook his head. “Set up the screen, will you, Bert?”

  “No trace at all of Ostrander?”

  “Another U.O., I said. It wiped out a little village in northeast France, which means that it belongs to the French. It was only through a stroke of luck that we even found out about it.”

  “Was there a passenger?”

  “Yes. Just as smashed as the last one. The French have agreed to exchange information with us. Colonel Stubbins is already in France, and some of my men went over with him. I had business to wind up on the West Coast, so I had the first reports flown to me there. I thought I might as well get your reaction on my way east.”

  “You’re going to France?”

  “Tomorrow. Ready, Bert? Where can I plug this thing in?”

  Haskins threaded in the film and adjusted the focus, and they were looking down into a valley at the demolished village. Rubble clogged the streets except for a lane that a bulldozer had carved out. Three tents stood in the foreground, and the wooded hills across the valley were scarred with the widening loops of the spiral.

  “How many people were killed?” Karvel asked.

  “They think seventy-three. The entire village. As you can see, it was built on a curve. At that point Force X was just wide enough to take all of it. The only survivor was the priest, who happened not to be home.”

  The camera moved closer. They could watch workmen shifting stones and moving rafters and shoveling rubble. A young priest stepped carefully amidst the debris, head bowed, hands clasped behind his back—a pathetic, lonely figure who had no soul left to attend to but his own. The dust had scarcely settled about the village, but it was as lifeless as Nineveh because its people had died with it.

  “What’s the name of the place?” Whistler asked.

  “St. Pierre something or other. Just a moment. Here it is—St.-Pierre-du-Bois.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s less well-known than Paris,” Haskins said dryly.

  “You said northeast France. I been all through there. I was stationed there more than a year, during the war. I don’t remember no St.-Pierre-du-Bois.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Karvel said. “It was too small to have a bar.”

  Haskins stopped the projector. “The rest is a close-up of the U.O.,” he said. He reversed the film to a shot of the entire valley, and dipped into his briefcase. “A farmer named Cras was walking on the road north of the village when Force X struck him. Before he died he made a statement. I want you to read it.”

  It consisted of a single paragraph. Cras had been hurrying home to supper. There was still enough light to see the village clearly, but he hadn’t been looking at it directly. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the church steeple fall. He stopped and stared, and the village wasn’t there. A moment before it had been, but now there wasn’t a single house standing. Just rubble piled up and flung about, and a cloud of dust rising over everything. He started to run, and then something struck him, and that was all he remembered.

  “Any comment?” Haskins asked.

  Karvel shook his head.

  “Getting hit by Force X is the one thing you’re expert in. Compare the Frenchman’s experience with yours, and see how many new assumptions you can come up with.”

  Karvel pushed himself to his feet and hobbled to the screen. “Cras must have been closer to the center of the spiral than I was. Are we facing north? Then he was somewhere along this road. Where was the U.O. found?”

  “Where the large tent is,” Haskins said. “They haven’t moved it yet.”

  “Here’s the loop that took the village, and on the next time around it took this tree by the road—he couldn’t have been that close—and then it got the trees south of the village. Cras must have been about here, which means that Force X approached him across open fields. He had no warning at all. Just a moment.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “The spiral goes clockwise. The spiral that struck me was moving counterclockwise.”

  “Are you sure? Yes, I see it now. That’s very interesting. I’ll have something to say to my men for having missed that. Can you think of anything else?”

  Karvel shook his head.

  Haskins turned off the projector and got out a cigar. “There are several interesting things about this U.O.-2. For one, it arrived with its fuel tank, if that’s the proper term for it, virtually empty. This naturally raises the question as to whether the stuff we analyzed really is fuel. We’ve sent a batch to the French for experimental purposes, but we can’t be positive yet that this is what makes a U.O. go.”

  “Their first experiment is likely to be their last one,” Karvel said.

  “They’ve been warned. For another thing, the passenger is absolutely unearthly. There is no possibility of it being related to any known Earth species. The French consider this proof positive that the U.O. comes from outer space.”

  “Are you certain that it’s a different U.O.?”

  Haskins nodded. “We took shavings for metallurgical analysis, which left marks. This U.O. doesn’t have any.”

  “Did they look for butterflies?”

  Haskins caught his breath. “I don’t think so, but I’ll see that they do. Can you fit this unearthly passenger into your time theory?”

  “Easily. We’ll soon have contact with other worlds. Eventually there’ll be contact with inhabited worlds, and those inhabitants will probably visit Earth. I see nothing strange in the idea of an unearthly being visiting us from the future.”

  Haskins bit firmly on his cigar, and emitted a series of short puffs. “Pressure,” he whispered, as though the word awed him. “Tremendous pressure. Do you have any idea how much pressure that U.O. is built to resist, inside and out? Neither do we, and we probably wouldn’t believe it if we knew. It isn’t spherical by accident, and it’s made of a strange alloy that is soft, but becomes hard under pressure. The more pressure, the harder it gets. For all we know, from the tests we’ve been able to make, that condition maintains to infinity. That soft metal—under pressure—is the hardest substance known to man.”

  “The instruments are designed—we think—so that pressure won’t damage them or change their settings. Under pressure they lock in place. The engineers who designed the U.O. knew that there’d be killing pressure, both insid
e and outside, but they made no attempt to protect the passenger. Why?”

  “We knew that there’d be killing pressure, but we made no attempt to protect the passenger we sent back to them.”

  Haskins gaped at him. “You mean—stowaways? Both of them? No.” He shook his head. “No. One I could accept, but not two. This can’t go on, you know. Twenty-eight people were killed by U.O.-1, and another sixty were injured seriously. Seventy-three were killed by U.O.-2. We were lucky both times. We may not be so lucky with U.O.-3.”

  “What are the chances of my taking a ride in U.O.-2?” Karvel asked.

  “None,” Haskins said bluntly. “The French have been highly cooperative in exchanging information, but that’s to their advantage as well as ours. They won’t be receptive to suggestions as to what they should do with the U.O. I personally think that their investigation is a mess, with nothing being done right, but that’s their privilege. We had our chance, and we blew it. Any passenger in this one would be French.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “It’s too bad, really. If you weren’t so banged up, I’d say it was an ideal job for you. No one has better qualifications, and you have no family at all, which is important. Even if you made the trip safely, you couldn’t come back. Do you know that?”

  “Unless I could hit the Sahara Desert dead center, there wouldn’t be any welcoming committee for me.”

  “The same would apply at the other end. You wouldn’t have diplomatic immunity, and if you killed a few thousand people when you arrived you’d start your negotiations under a handicap.”

  “That’s a risk we’d have to take.”

  “There’s no doubt that the job is made to order for you,” Haskins said slowly. “A freak accident cost you outer space, and saved you for man’s ultimate frontier—time.” He smiled. “If your theory is correct. But U.O.-2 belongs to the French. It’s a shame. I’ll put it to you frankly. The U.O.’s are utterly beyond us. We aren’t ready for them, technologically or morally. The man who could put a stop to them just might be the savior of twentieth-century civilization.”

  “Will you put the proposition to the French?”

  “No. I know they’d refuse, and it might make them suspicious. We’re working together nicely, and I want to keep it that way.” He glanced at his watch. “You’re staying here for a while? I’ll keep in touch with you. If there were anything for you to do in France I’d take you along, but there isn’t. Will you roll up the screen, Bert?”

  He shook hands with both of them and was gone as suddenly as he had arrived. Whistler stood in the trailer door, watching the diminishing taillights and muttering to himself.

  “St.-Pierre-du-Bois. I still think I shoulda heard of it.”

  “What did you do in the army?” Karvel asked.

  “I was mess sergeant in a lousy replacement depot. I wanted to kill Germans, so they made me a cook.”

  “So you killed Americans instead. What would you rather do—stay here by yourself and study philosophy, or—”

  “You’re going to France.”

  Karvel nodded.

  “You think you’re going to swipe that U.O. and take a ride in it.”

  Karvel nodded again.

  “I can see it now—you carting it away in your wheel chair, with an army of Frenchmen chasing you!”

  “I know it sounds ridiculous. It’s a thousand to one against my getting close to the U.O., and another thousand to one against my finding it refueled and ready to go. After that, the odds start getting long. But I’m going.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “There isn’t time. The longer I wait, the less chance I’ll have. The present security arrangements look pretty feeble, but any minute the French may decide to put the U.O. behind fences and locked doors.”

  “What does that have to do with taking me?”

  “Do you have a passport?”

  “That won’t take long,” Whistler said confidently. “I know a bartender in Washington—”

  Karvel laughed.

  “—that knows everybody. You need me. You need somebody to drive your car, and push your chair, and run errands. Like I told you, I been all through that part of France. I parley enough French to be understood, and I know at least four hundred dames, and four thousand black market operators—every other Frenchman was a black market operator in those days—and all the taverns.”

  “The black market operators I can understand,” Karvel said. “And the taverns. But I never would have suspected the four hundred dames. All right. I think 1 can manage a more direct connection with the State Department than through your bartender. I’ll start packing, and you telephone for the plane schedules.”

  Chapter 6

  Seven days later Karvel took the Night Ferry at Dover, leaving behind in England the cast from his knee, a substantial portion of his bank balance, and a mystified firm of engineers. In Dunkerque he left an equally mystified customs official, who was overtly suspicious of the heavy, wheel-mounted trunk that Karvel’s various papers and documents alleged to contain routine business equipment.

  “I’m in the salvage business,” Karvel explained, with as much aplomb as he could muster. “Marine salvage. Underwater work. This is diving equipment.”

  His papers were in order, and he had a beautifully forged letter from the Port Authority of Strasbourg concerning a construction project. In the end the customs official could discover no reason why Karvel and his trunk should not be admitted to France, though he spent some time in trying.

  Whistler was waiting with a small panel truck. He hurriedly got the trunk loaded, and they drove away into an overcast French dawn.

  “The wheels were a mistake,” Whistler announced. “A trunk with wheels is unusual. The French don’t like things to be unusual.”

  “Later on, you’ll appreciate the wheels,” Karvel told him. “I have all I can do to move myself around. You’ll have to handle the trunk.”

  “We’ll have plenty of help,” Whistler said confidently.

  “What about the U.O.?”

  “It’s still there. The bigwigs have gone—Haskins and his bunch, and the French civilians. They were staying in Thionville and commuting every day, but they moved out last night. I think they finished studying it, and now they’re trying to figure out what to do with it.”

  “Is it still in the tent?”

  “Sure.”

  “I can’t understand why they’d leave it there.”

  “They want to make it easy for us, why should we worry? I guess you made out all right in England.”

  “No one could understand why I’d be putting diving equipment through such a small opening, but it was my money. Did you have any trouble?”

  “Naw. I arranged things without hardly showing my face. You got nothing to worry about. Just leave everything to me.”

  Karvel smiled. “You’ve arranged to have the U.O. fueled and ready to go?”

  “Oh, that. I don’t know what you’ll find when you get there, but I guarantee to get you there. I got a plan.”

  They traveled southeast along the sparsely traveled roads of northern France, following a route that avoided the larger towns. Their leisurely pace soon became irksome to Karvel. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Lost your nerve?”

  “Relax,” Whistler said. “We got plenty of time. We don’t want to get to Thionville much before dark.”

  “Why not? I’d like to see St.-Pierre-du-Bois by daylight.”

  “You couldn’t get close enough for a look anyway. They got roadblocks up. Anyway, it wasn’t nothing to see even when it was a town. I been through it dozens of times, and never noticed it. Like you said, it was too small to have a bar.”

  At noon they stopped to stretch their legs and make a roadside meal of long loaves of French bread, and cheese, and raw red wine. Karvel’s left leg was badly in need of stretching. He sat on the grass and massaged his knee while Whistler paced back and forth, chomping on bread and ch
eese and casting wicked aspersions on the morals, habits, and institutions of the French peasantry.

  “I wish I could speak French,” Karvel said. “It’d be interesting to find out what they think of you.”

  Whistler halted his pacing and regarded Karvel quizzically. “I don’t think I ever asked you. Why do you want to take a ride in that thing?”

  “Good question. I wish I had a good answer.” To find Ostrander? There wasn’t a chance in a million that the lieutenant was still alive. To save twentieth-century civilization? It was doomed anyway. No civilization was immortal, and Karvel would not lament the passing of this one.

  He said slowly, “Have you ever visited an orphanage?”

  “No. What does that have to do with it?”

  “I was brought up in an orphanage. There may be worse environments for a child than that particular institution, but I hope not. My earliest resolution in life was that I’d never make any child an orphan, or any wife a widow.”

  “So that’s why you never got married,” Whistler said. “I guess that’s why you lost your leg, too—trying to keep from making some dame a widow.”

  Karvel did not answer.

  “What’s all that got to do with taking a ride in the U.O.? Just ‘cause you had a rough time as a kid is no reason for not having fun now. So it was a lousy orphanage. So what? We got lousy legislatures, and lousy colleges, and lousy hospitals. Why should orphanages be different?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand that you’re a damn fool. Here you are, still young, with a good pension for life and nothing to worry about, and you’re bellyaching about being an orphan. I been an orphan myself for nearly ten years, and you never heard me complaining.”

  “I suppose an honest answer would be that I’m running away.”

  “That’s even sillier.”

  “It is,” Karvel agreed.