It was months since she had returned to twenty. And now, in a flash, she was forty. The touch of the tweezers against the needle's end, pushing, had aged her twenty years.

  That explained what had happened at the police station. It meant—if she could only pull it back—She fought to steady her fingers, then applied the tweezers.

  She was twenty againl

  Abruptly weak, she lay down on the bed. She thought: Somewhere in the world of time and space was the still-Hving body of the man that had been Jack Garson. But for him she could throw this key thing into the river three blocks away, take the first train east or west or south, and the power of the machine would be futile against her. Dr. Lell would not seriously consider searching for her once she had lost herself in the swarm of humankind.

  How simple it all was, really. For three long years, their power over her had been the key and its one devastating ability to age her. Or was that all? Startled, she sat up. Did they count, perhaps, on their victims believing themselves safe enough to keep the key and its magic powers of rejuvenation. She, of course, because of Jack Garson, was bound to the key as if it was still the controller, and not she. But the other incentive, now that she had thought of it, was enormous. Her fingers shook as she picked up the key with its glowing, intricate interior. It seemed incredible that they could have allowed the precious instrument to pass so easily into the hands of an alien, when they must have known that there was a probability of discovery.

  I She had an idea then; she grew calm. With suddenly steady fingers, she picked up the tweezers, caught the protruding glow point of the key between the metal jaws and, making no attempt to pull or push, twisted screw-wise. There was a tiny, almost inaudible click. Her body twanged like a taut violin string, and was falling, falling into dark, immeasurable distance. Out of that night, a vaguely shining body drifted toward her, a body human yet not human. There was something about the head and the shoulders, something physically different that eluded her slow thought. And in that strange, superhuman head were eyes that blazed like jewels, and seemed literally to pierce her. The voice that came couldn't have been sound, for it was inside her brain, and it said: "With this great moment, you enter upon your power and your purpose. I say to you, the time-energy barrier must not be completed. It will destroy all the ages of the Solar System. The time-energy barrier must not, not, NOT be completed—"

  The body faded, and was gone. The very memory of it became a dim mind-shape. There remained the darkness, the jet, incredible darkness.

  Abruptly, she was in a material world. She seemed , to be half-slumped, half-kneeling, one leg folded under her in the exact position she had occupied on the bed. Only she must have drooped there unconscious for long moments. Her knees ached with the hard, pressing pain of her position. And, beneath the silk of her stockings was, not the hotel bed, but metal!

  CHAPTER 8

  It was the combination of surprise, the aloneness, and the stark fact of what was happening that unnerved Garson. He started to squirm, then he was writhing, his face twisted in agony. And then the strength of the rough, stolid hands holding him seemed to flow somehow along his nerves.

  He willed himself calm. And was safe from madness!

  There were no hands touching him now. He lay, face downward on a flat, hard surface; and at first there was only the darkness and a slow return of the sense of aloneness. Vague thoughts came, thoughts of Norma and of the coincidence that had molded his life, seemingly so free for so many years, yet destined to find its ending here in this black execution chamber. For he was being destroyed here, though his body might live on for a few brief mindless hours. Or days. Or weeks. The time didn't matter.

  The thing was fantastic. Surely, in a minute he'd wake up from this nightmare.

  At first the sound was less than a whisper, a stealthy noise out of remoteness, that prodded with an odd insistence at Garson's hearing. It quivered toward him in the blackness, edging out of inaudibility, a rasping presence that grew louder-voices! It exploded into a monstrous existence, a billion voices clamoring at his brain, a massive blare that pressed at him. Abruptly, the ferocity of the voices dimmed. They faded into distance, still insistent, somehow reluctant to leave, as if there was something still left unsaidc

  The end of sound came, and briefly, there was utter silence. Then there was a click. Light flooded at him from an opening a scant foot from his head. Garson twisted and stared, fascinated. Daylight! From his vantage point, he could see the edge of a brick-and-stone building, a wretchedly old, worn building, a street of Delpa.

  It was over. Incredibly, it was over. And nothing had happened. No, that wasn't it exactly. There were things in his mind, confusing things about the importance of loyalty to the Glorious, a sense of intimacy with his surroundings, pictures of machines, but nothing clear.

  A harsh voice broke his amazed blur of thought, "Come on out of there, you damned slow poke!"

  A square, heavy, brutal face was peering into the open door, a big, square-built young man with a thick neck, a boxer's flat nose, and unpleasant blue eyes.

  Garson lay quite still. It was not that he intended to disobey. His reason urged instant, automatic obedience until he could estimate the astounding things that had happened. What held him there, every muscle stiff, was a new, tremendous fact that grew, not out of the meaning of the man's words, but out of the words themselves.

  The language was not English. Yet he had understood every word.

  The sudden squint of impatient rage that flushed the coarse face peering in at him brought life to Garson's muscles. He scrambled forward, but it was the man's big hands that actually pulled him clear and deposited him with a jarring casualness face downward on the paved road.

  He lay tense for an instant, fighting a mad fury. Yet he dare not show his anger. Something had gone wrong. The machine hadn't worked all the way, and he must not wreck the great chance that offered, He stood up slowly, wondering how an automaton, a depersonalized human being, should look and act.

  "This way, damn you," said the bullying voice from behind him. "You're in the army now." Satisfaction came into the voice. "Well, you're the last for me today. I'll get you fellows to the front, and then—"

  "This way" led to a dispirited-looking group of men, about a hundred of them, who "Stood in two rows alongside a great, gloomy, dirty building. Gar-son walked stolidly to the end of the rear line, and for the first time realized how surprisingly straight the formation of men were holding their lines, in spite of their dulled appearance.

  "All right, all right," bellowed the square-jawed young man. "Let's get going. You've got some hard fighting ahead of you before this day and night are over."

  It struck Garson, as he stared at the leader, that this was the type they picked for nonrecalcitrant training: the ignorant, blatant, amoral, sensual pig-man type. No wonder he himself had been rejected by the Observer. His eyes narrowed to slits as he watched the line of dead-alive men walk by him in perfect rhythm. He fell in step, his mind deliberately slow and ice-cold. Cautiously he explored the strange knowledge in his brain that didn't fit with his freedom.

  It didn't, in fact, fit with anything that had happened. But it was there, nevertheless, a little group of sentences that kept repeating inside him: "The great time-energy barrier is being built in Delpa. It must not be completed, for it will destroy the Universe. Prepare to do your part in its destruction. Try to tell the Planetarians, but take no unnecessary risks. To stay alive, to tell the Planetarians, those are your immediate purposes. The time-energy barrier must not-NOT-"

  The repetition grew monotonous. He squeezed the crazy thing out of his consciousness.

  No trucks came gliding along to transport them, no streetcar whispered along in some futuristic development of street-railway service. There was no machinery, nothing but those narrow avenues with their gray, sidewalkless length, like back alleys.

  They walked to war; and it was like being in a dead, old deserted city. Deserted except for the straggle of short, thick, slow, stolid men and women who plodded heavily by, unsmiling and without a side glance. As if they were but the pitiful, primitive remnant of a once-great race, and this city *he proud monument to—NO! Garson smiled wryly. It was foolish to feel romantic about this monstrosity of a city. Even without Dr. Lell's words as a reminder, it was evident that every narrow, dirty street, and every squalid building had been erected to be what it was.

  And the sooner he got out of the place, and delivered to the Planetarians the queer, inexplicable message about the great time-energy barrier, the better off he'd be. With deliberate abruptness, he cut the thought. He'd have to be careful. If one of the Glorious should happen to be around, and accidentally catch the free thought of what was supposed to be an automaton, next time there'd be no mistake.

  Tramp, tramp, tramp! The pavement echoed hollowly, like a ghost city. He had the tremendous thought that he was here centuries, perhaps millennia, into the future. What an awful realization to think that Norma, poor, persecuted, enslaved Norma, whose despairing face he had seen little more than an hour ago, was actually dead and buried in the dim ages of the long ago. And yet she was alive. Those six hundred billion bodies per minute of hers were somewhere in space and time, alive because the great time energy followed its casual, cosmic course of endless repetition, because life was but an accident as purposeless as the immeasurable energy that plunged grandly on into the unknown night that must be somewhere! Tramp, tramp,—On and on, and his thought was a rhythm to the march.

  At last he came out of his reverie, and saw the red haze in the near distance ahead. It wouldn't take ten minutes more, and they'd be there! Machines glinted in the slanting rays of the warm, golden, sinking sun; machines that moved and fought! A sick thrill struck Garson, the first shock of realization that this tiny segment of the battle of the ages was real, and near, and deadly. Up there, every minute men were dying miserably for a cause their depersonalized minds did not even comprehend. Up there, too, was infinitesimal victory for the Planetarians, and a small, stinging measure of defeat for the Glorious. Forty feet a day, Dr. Lell had said.

  Forty feet of city conquered every day. What a murderous war of attrition. What a bankruptcy of strategy. Or was it the ultimate nullification of the role of military genius, in that each side knew and practiced every rule of military science without error?—and the forty feet was simply the inevitable mathematical outcome of the difference in the potential in striking power of the two forces.

  Forty feet a day. Wonderingly, Garson stood finally with his troop a hundred yards from that unnatural battle front. Like a robot he stood stiffly among those robot men, but bis eyes and mind fed in undiminished fascination at the deadly mechanical routine that was the offense and defense.

  The Planetarians had seven major machines, and there were at least half a hundred tiny, swift, glittering craft as escort for each of the great—battleships! That was it: battleships and destroyers. Against them, the Glorious had only destroyers, a host of darting, shining, torpedo-shaped craft that hugged the ground, and fought in an endlessly repeated, complicated maneuver.

  Maneuver against maneuver; an intricate game. It was a game, an incredibly involved game whose purpose and method seemed to quiver just beyond the reach of his reason. Everything revolved around the battleships. In some way they must be protected from energy guns, because no attempt was made to use energy against them. Somehow, too, cannon must be useless against them. There was none in sight, nor was there any other method of propelling solid objects at the machines. The Planetarians did not even fire at the more than a hundred troops like his own, who stood at stiff attention so close to the front, so bunched that a few superexplosive shells of the future would have smashed them all. There was nothing but the battleships and the destroyers!

  The battleships moved forward and backward and forward and backward and in and out, intertwining among themselves; and the destroyers of the Glorious darted in when the battleships came forward, and hung back when the battleships retreated. And always the destroyers of the Planetarians were gliding in to intercept the destroyers of the Glorious. As the sun sank in a blaze of red beyond the green hills to the west, the battleships in their farthest forward thrust were feet closer than they had been at the beginning; and the sharply delineated red line of haze, that must be the point where the time-energy barrier was neutralized, was no longer lying athwart a shattered slab of rock, but on the ground feet nearer.

  That was it. The battleships somehow forced the time-energy barrier to be withdrawn. Obviously, it would only be withdrawn to save it from a worse fate, perhaps from a complete neutralization over a wide front. And so a city was being won, inch by inch, foot by foot, street by street. Only the intricate evolution of the battle, the why of that almost immeasurably slow victory, was as great a mystery as ever.

  Garson thought grimly: If the message that had come into his brain in that out-of-order depersonalizing machine was true, then the final victory would not come quickly enough. Long before the forty-feet-a-day conquerors had gained the prize that was Delpa, the secret, super, time-energy barrier would be completed; and the human race and all its works would be eliminated from the universe.

  Night fell, but a glare of searchlights replaced the sun, and that fantastic battle raged on. No one aimed a gun or a weapon at the lights. Each side concentrated on its part of the intricate, murderous game; and troop after troop dissolved into the ravenous, incredible conflagration.

  Death came simply to the automatons. Each in turn crowded into one of the torpedo-shaped destroyers. Each individual had learned from the depersonalizing machine that the tiny, man-sized tank was operated by thought control. Highly trained in that limited sense, the human automaton flashed out to the battle line. Sometimes the end came swiftly, sometimes it was delayed, but sooner or later there was metallic contact with the enemy; and that was all that was needed. Instantly, the machine would twist and race toward the line of waiting men; the next victim would drag out the corpse and crawl in himself.

  There were variations. Machines clashed with the enemy and died with their drivers; or darted aimlessly out of control. Always, swift metallic scavengers raced from both sides to capture the prize; and sometimes the Planetarians succeeded, sometimes the Glorious. Garson counted: one, two, three—less than four hundred men ahead of him.

  As he realized how close his turn was, cold perspiration beaded his face. Minutes! Damn it, damn it, he had to solve the rules of this battle, or go in there without plan, without hope.

  Seven battleships, scores of destroyers to each battleship and all acting as one unit in one involved maneuver.

  And, by heaven, he had a part of the answer. One unit. Not seven battleships out there, but one in the form of seven. One superneutralizing machine in its seven-dimensional maneuver. No wonder he had been unable to follow the intertwinings of those monsters with each other, the retreats, the advances. Mathematicians of the twentieth century could only solve easily problems with four equations. Here was a problem with seven; and the general staff of the Glorious could never be anything but a step behind in their solution. That step cost them forty feet a day.

  It was his turn! He crept into the casing of the torpedo cycle; and it was smaller even than he had thought. The machine fitted him almost like a glove. Effortlessly, it glided forward, too smoothly, too willingly, into that dazzle of searchlights, into that maelstrom of machines. One contact, he thought, one contact with an enemy meant death; and his plan of breaking through was as vague as his understanding of how a seven-dimensional maneuver actually worked.

  Amazed wonder came that he was even letting himself hope.

  CHAPTER 9

  Norma began to notice the difference, a strange, vibrant, flame-like quality within herself. She felt warmly alive, a new kind of aliveness added now to the life that had always existed within her.

  Physically, she was still crouching there tautly, her legs twisted under her, vision still blinded; and the hard pain of the metal beneath her was an unchanged pressure against the bone and muscle of her knees. But along every nerve crept that wonderful sense of wellbeing, of strange, abnormal power. It yielded abruptly to the violence of the thought that flashed into her mind: "Where was she? What had happened? What—"

  The thought snapped in the middle because, amazingly, an alienness intruded into it, another thought, not out of her own mind, not even directed at her, not—human!

  "—Tentacle 2731 reporting to the Observer. A warning light has flashed on the… (meaningless)… time machine. Action!"

  The answer came instantly, coldly: "An intruder —on top of the primary time machine. Warning from, and to, Dr. Lell's section. Tentacle 2731, go at once —destroy intruder. Action!"

  There were stunning immensities in those hard wisps of message and answering message, that echoed back along the dim corridors of her mind. The stupefying fact that she had effortlessly intercepted thought waves momentarily blotted out the immediacy of the danger. The impact of the death threat struck her suddenly.

  Before that colossal menace, even the knowledge of where she was came with a quiet unobtrusiveness, like a minor harmony in a clash of major discord. Her present location was only too obvious. By twisting the key, she had been hurtled through time to the age of the Glorious, to the primary-time machine, where fantastic things called tentacles and observers were ceaselessly on guard.

  If only she could see! She must see, or she was lost before she could begin to hope. Frantically, she strained against the blackness that lay so tight against her eyes.

  She saw!

  It was as simple as that. One instant, blindness. The next, the urge to see. And then, sight complete, without preliminary blur, like opening her eyes after a quiet sleep.

 

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