Beyond the Barrier

Chapter Ten

In the morning, both aliens were sullen and heavy-eyed; they spoke to each other in monosyllables, and to Naismith not at all. The child, Yegga, alternately screamed and whined.

After they had breakfasted, Lall and Churan seemed to come sluggishly to life. The woman began to dress in the same short robe she had worn yesterday, saying over her shoulder to Naismith, “Today you will train in the gymnasium there is some equipment there which will prepare you to hunt Zug.”

“I know. I found it there.”

She turned to look at him expressionlessly, then went on with her dressing. “Very well, that will save us time. You saw the Zug, then? What did you think of it?”

“Very impressive, but I don’t see why it was necessary.”

“You are to play the role of a Zug hunter,” she said, fastening the robe around her waist. “If you should see one without preparation, you would betray yourself immediately.”

“I see.” Remembering the vision that had come to him that night in his Beverly Hills apartment, Naismith asked, “And the gun? What was that for?”

She turned with a questioning expression. Churan, who had just entered the lounge carrying the time vehicle, paused to listen. “Gun?” asked Lall.

“Yes, certainly,” Naismith answered with a touch of impatience. “That night, in my bedroom. Tell me, just what would have happened if I had accepted that gun?”

The two aliens looked at each other. Churan opened his mouth to speak, but Lall said sharply, “Be still!” She turned to Naismith, fumbling in the pocket of her robe, and produced a black cylinder. She pushed bowls and plates aside, and rapidly sketched a pistol recognizable as the one Naismith had seen, with its flowing lines and massive grip. Churan came to watch over her shoulder; there was something strained in his silent attention.

“Was it a gun like this?” she asked.

“Yes, of course.”

She turned away indifferently, putting the cylinder back in her pocket. “It would have given you a compulsion to kill Zug,” she said. “Only a precaution.”

Churan was staring at her silently. “Well, are you ready?”

she snapped at him. “Why do we have to wait—why can’t we go?”

Churan shrugged, held up the machine in both hands. He touched the controls; the shadow-egg sprang into being around him. With a last quick glance to left and right, Lall herded the child inside, stood back for Naismith to enter, stepped in herself.

It was more crowded than ever in the shadow-egg, and the scent of the aliens’ bodies was oppressively heavy. By their tense attitudes and their sidelong glances at him, Naismith could tell that his presence made them equally uneasy. Seated on the stool, Churan touched the controls, and they drifted up from the floor, across the lounge and into the corridor.

Once more they followed the red line; blackness swallowed them as they passed through the mound, then they were in dazzling sunlight.

Suddenly, the contrast between the unpleasant closeness of the shadow-egg and that clean brightness outside was more than Naismith could stand.

“Wait,” he said. “I want to get out.”

“What?” Lall and Churan stared at him.

“Set me down there, on top of the mound,” he said, pointing.

“I want to breathe the fresh air for a minute.”

Churan said impatiently, “We have no time to waste—you can breathe where you are.” He put his hands on the controls, but Lall stopped him.

“After all, you want to practice using the ejector,” she muttered. “What harm can it do? Set him down.”

Churan grumbled, but in a moment the shadow-egg swung up along the steep slope, rose to the summit and hovered there, a few inches above the grasstops.

Churan stared down at the machine in his lap, rubbing his squat fingers together and grunting. At last he said, “Miko, move back a little—take the child. Mr. Naismith, you stay where you are.”

The woman and child crowded back beside Churan. Naismith waited tensely. Churan’s fingers touched the controls again, and abruptly Naismith felt himself picked up, swung out away from the aliens. The shadow-egg had bulged out-ward; now it was like two eggs, connected by a narrow tube of shadow. Then, without warning, the bulge vanished. Naismith was falling….

He landed with a jar, arms out for balance. When he looked up, the shadow-egg was drifting off on a long slant down toward the base of the mound.

He stood looking around him, breathing thankfully deep.

The greenish-yellow plain rolled away unbroken to the horizon.

It was early, the sun low in the east, and the thick grasses around his legs were beaded with dew. The sun was warm, but the air had a bracing coolness. Naismith filled his lungs again and again; earth smells, green smells, scents of spring flowers.

He sat down and watched the great wrinkled sheet of cloud drift slowly toward the west. Down below, the shadow-egg still hovered over the plain, a hundred yards or so away. He could just make out Lall’s and Churan’s faces: they seemed close in conversation. Farther out, a flock of birds arose from the grass and settled again. Still farther away, Naismith saw a larger body moving through the grassy hummocks—a quad-ruped, too large for a deer; perhaps an elk. But there were no men. Not a thread of smoke; not a cloud of dust.

From this height, he could see the immense buried shape of the ship more plainly. The world around him was peaceful and empty, as if waiting for another Creation.

Naismith thought of the blank thirty-one years of his life, and of his four years in California, now seen as futile and mis-understood; then of the tremendous distance he had traveled in the shadow-egg with Lall and Churan—-over nine thousand years; and the Earth was still here with its seasons.… He thought of the distance he had yet to go—“twenty thousand years, Mr. Naismith,” Churan had said. And it seemed to him, as it had from the beginning, that there was a monstrous meaning hidden in all this. It was all around him, in the slow drift of the clouds across the sky, in the sense of the buried giant under his feet. For the first time, he felt less as if he were fighting a battle than as if he were engaged in a quest for knowledge.

He stood up again. Who am I? he thought; and unexpectedly, his body began to tremble. Images floated up into awareness: he could see the corridors of the City, and the colorful, floating throngs of Lenlu Din—all clear but distant, like figures in a peepshow. He knew who the Shefthi were, and could even conjure up some of their faces… but there was no image of himself. Who and what was he?… that was what he had to find out.

He stared down at the shadow-egg. The two aliens were still talking together, but in a moment they glanced up. Naismith gestured. Churan raised his hand; then the shadow-egg began to drift nearer, growing larger as it swept up the side of the mound. There was something incongruous about the egg’s absolute internal stillness as it moved—as if the egg itself were really fixed, in some transcendent dimension, while the world swam under it.

The thought ended as the shadow-egg came to rest, near enough to touch. The orifice opened. “Get in!” said Lall.

… Then he was inside, in the suffocating closeness of the shadow-egg, while the landscape receded beneath. They were rising, moving more and more swiftly northeastward; and Naismith saw that time outside was at a standstill: there was no movement of wind in the tall grasses below, and the clouds overhead were as solid and motionless as if painted on the sky.

“Where to now?” he asked.

The aliens glanced up but did not speak. Even the child Yegga, was staring at him silently.

The Earth became a blurred green ball, spinning massively below. The sense of motion was so powerful that Naismith had an impulse to brace himself against it. But when he closed his eyes, there was no feeling of movement at all.

When the Earth’s giddy motion slowed, Naismith saw a glint of silver ahead, and realized that they must be approaching one of the Great Lakes, probably Lake Michigan. Now they were dropping closer to the ground, skirting the rim of the lake… slowly, now, almost at a walking pace… The egg came to rest.

Churan’s fingers touched the controls. Outside, day was abruptly replaced by night: then day again, like a sudden white blow. Night, day, night, blending now into a shivering gray-ness. Once more Naismith saw the sun arching over them like a fireball, and the ground below seemed to heave and then subside, while a mist of foliage came and went, came and went.

Abruptly, there were roads. They sprang into being as if die-stamped—real highways, crisscrossing the land. At the foot of the lake there was a blurred city, growing and changing too fast for Naismith to catch its outlines. There was an impression of mud-brown hovels, replaced instantly by taller, paler buildings; then skyscrapers were sprouting upward, glittering, like a sudden growth of crystals.

Now the growth stopped, fell back. In another moment the city was gone; the roads were gone: nothing was left but the bare earth and a scattering of tiny, cone-roofed structures no bigger than barrels.

“What’s happened?” Naismith demanded.

“They went underground,” Lall said tonelessly. “The city is still there.” A breath of darkness crossed the sky; there were glints of fiery light in it, gone almost too quickly to see. “There was a war,” she added.

“Here?” Churan asked.

“A little farther,” the woman muttered.

Day again: night; day. And the shadow-egg was hovering, under a late-afternoon sky. It moved, drifting down toward the nearest of the cone-roofed objects. Naismith saw now that the thing was a ventilator.

The shadow-egg went on dropping. The ground came up around them like a tide of darkness, and Naismith held his breath instinctively as it mounted over their heads. There was an instant of stifling blackness, and then they were dropping down through a blue-green cavern… a vast place, acres of gigantic machines under a rock ceiling, illuminated by the eye-hurting glare of mercury vapor lights. The place was gigantic, throbbing with power… and empty.

Naismith looked around as the shadow-egg touched. “Where are all the people?”

“Dead,” said Lall tensely. “There was a war. They are all dead.” She moistened her lips. “Now let me give you your instructions. You realize that once we have dropped you here, you are on your own. When you were thrown back in time, this is where you will say you landed. You will find here an unfinished time vehicle, the first crude prototype. You will complete it, following the plans you find beside it. Then you will go forward to the City. After you get through the Barrier, the rest is up to you.” The shadow-egg was drifting down a wide corridor between gigantic machines.

“There it is,” she said.

Naismith saw a clear space, some low workbenches, and leaning against the wall, a thing that might have been the skeleton of a rocket-sled. It was a tapered bar of metal, six feet long, with two crosspieces. Controls were set into the upper crosspiece, and Naismith could imagine the rider lying on the shaft, feet on the lower crosspiece, hands gripping the upper one like handlebars….

“That is the time machine?” he asked, half incredulously.

“No, not yet. It can be adapted as such. The inventors were trying to make a device for exploring the interior of the Earth.

They hoped in this way to escape the devastation which over-took them. But all they succeeded in doing was to neutralize matter. If you boarded the machine as it now is, you would simply fall through the Earth, and go on falling. The pro-pulsive unit is not installed.”

Naismith glanced around. Tools lay on the workbenches, among scattered papers, as if someone had laid them aside only an hour ago.… He felt a touch of uneasiness. “What happened to them?” he asked.

“Killed in the first attack,” Lall said emotionlessly. “That black cloud you saw, just before we stopped—that was the bombs.”

“How—?” began Naismith. But already Lall was drawing the child back beside her; Churan’s fingers were busy on the controls. Naismith felt himself lifted as the shadow-egg bulged again. Then he was dropped unceremoniously on the stone floor. The shadow-egg hovered a few feet away.

“One thing she forgot to tell you,” said Churan, with an unpleasant smile. “The second attack is going to take place in just thirty seconds. That is the one that pulverizes this City to a depth of fifty meters.”

It was like a pailful of icy water in the face. Naismith found himself thinking with cold clarity, Then the workers must have gone down to shelter. That’s why there are no bodies.

“But why?” he said, taking a step closer. His mind was ferociously concentrated on the shadow-egg: he must succeed in getting back in, somehow…

“You should not have told us about the gun, Mr. Naismith,”

said Lall, watching him through narrowed eyes.

Realization struck him. The aliens had not sent the apparition of the gun. They had not sent the dreams, either. Then there were others, who—

“Ten seconds,” said Churan, glancing up from his controls.

“The lie detector—” said Naismith desperately.

“They know about you,” replied Lall. “Therefore you are useless to us.” Her face went hard and ugly. “The whole effort is wasted.”

“Five seconds,” added Churan. “Four. Three….”

Naismith whirled. In one leap he reached the skeletal machine; feet and hands were on the crosspieces. He found a lever under his fingers, pulled it over hard.

The world went grayish and unreal around him. As it toppled, the machine began to sink into the floor—falling, as if the stone floor and the earth beneath it were so much mist.

Once more, before the darkness closed over his head, the last things he saw were the triumphant smiles of the aliens.