Earth's Last Fortress

  She began to have thoughts then, and question?—all the questions that had ever puzzled her. Why had Dr. Lell kept repeating that she had made no trouble according to the Glorious historical record of her, when trouble was all she had ever given? Why had she been able to defeat the first tentacle, and yet now her power, that had called Jack Garson from some remote time, was futile against them? And where was Dr. Lell? With an effort she finally roused her brain from its repetitious pondering over paradoxes. What words she used then, she could not have repeated, for she remembered nothing of them a moment after they were spoken. In her mind was only a fascinated horror of expectation that grew and grew as a sound came from the water near her feet.

  The water stirred. It sighed as if yielding to some body that pressed its dark elements. It gurgled in a way that gave her a feeling of queer, obscene horror, and a body blacker than itself, and bigger than any man, made a glinting, ugly rim of foam.

  It was Jack Garson’s fingers, strong and unflinching, grasping her, and his hard, determined voice that prevented her from uttering the panicky words of demon exorcise that quivered at the edge of her mind.

  “Wait!” he said. “It’s victory, not defeat. Wait!”

  “Thank you, Professor Garson!” The voice that came out of the darkness held a strange, inhuman quality that kept her taut and uneasy. It went on, “For your sakes, I could approach in no other way. We of the four hundred and ninetieth century A.D.. are human in name only. There is a dreadful irony in the thought that war, the destroyer of men, finally changed man into a beastlike creature. One solace remains: We saved our minds at the expense of our bodies.

  “Your analysis was right, Professor Garson, as far as it went. The reason we cannot use a time machine from our age is that our whole period will be in a state of abnormal unbalance for hundreds of thousands of years; even the tiniest misuse of energy could cause unforeseeable changes in the fabric of the time-energy cycle, which is so utterly indifferent to the fate of men. Our method could only be the indirect and partially successful one of isolating the explosion on one of eighteen solar systems, and drawing all the others together to withstand the shock. This was not so difficult as it sounds, for time yields easily to simple pressures.

  “Miss Matheson, the reason the tentacles could trail you is that you were being subjected to psychological terrors. The tentacles that have been following you through the night were not real, but third-order light projections of tentacles, designed to keep you occupied till Dr. Lell could bring his destroyer machines to bear. Actually, you have escaped all their designs. How? I have said time yields to proper pressures. Such a pressure existed as you stood by the river’s edge trying to recall the mood of suicide. It was easier for you to have power to slip through time to that period nearly four years earlier than for you to recapture an unwanted lust for self-inflicted death.”

  “Good heavens!” Garson gasped. “Are you trying to tell us that this is that night, and that a few minutes from now Dr. Lell will come along and hire a desperate girl sitting on a park bench to be a front for a fake Calonian recruiting station?

  “And this time,” said the inhuman voice, “the history of the Glorious will be fulfilled. She will make no trouble.”

  Garson had the sudden desperate sensation of being beyond his depth. “What—what about our bodies that existed then? I thought two bodies of the same person couldn’t exist in the same time and space.”

  “They can’t!”

  “But—”

  The firm, alien voice cut him off, cut off, too, Norma’s sudden, startled intention to speak. “There are no paradoxes in time. I have said that, in order to resist the destruction of the isolated eighteenth solar system, the other seventeen were brought together into one—this one! The only one that now exists! But the others were, and in some form you were in them. But now you are here, and this is the real and only world.

  “I leave you to think that over, for now you must act. History says that you two took out a marriage license—tomorrow. History says Norma Garson had no difficulty leading the double life of wife of Professor Garson and slave to Dr. Lell; and that, under my direction, she learned to use her power until the day came to destroy the great energy barrier of Delpa and help the Planetarians to their rightful victory.”

  Garson was himself again. “Rightful?” he said. “I’m not so convinced of that. They were the ones who precipitated the war by breaking the agreement for population curtailment.”

  “Rightful,” said the voice firmly, “because they first denounced the agreement on the grounds that it would atrophy the human spirit and mind. They fought the war on a noble plane, and offered compromise until the last moment. No automatons are on their side, and all the men they directly recruited from the past were plainly told they were wanted for dangerous work. Most of them were unemployed veterans of past wars.”

  Norma found her voice, “That second recruiting station I saw, with the Greeks and the Romans—”

  “Exactly. But now you must receive your first lesson in the intricate process of mind and thought control, enough to fool Dr. Lell—”

  The odd part of it was that, in spite of all the words that had been spoken, the warm glow of genuine belief didn’t come to her until she sat in the dim light on the bench, and watched the gaunt body of Dr. Lell stalking out of the shadowed path. Poor, unsuspecting superman!