The Fury Out of Time (14 page)

The pilot gestured again, and took off while Karvel was clambering over the side. They shot upward a dozen feet, and then moved slowly. The men on the ground drifted together into a tight group, and stood looking after them. It was not until they began to gather speed that Karvel realized they were traveling
away
from the city.

He asked a question, looking closely at the pilot for the first time.

Excitedly the pilot spoke gibberish, waved an arm, spoke again. His left hand rested on a pattern of raised, rectangular surfaces, and he fingered this keyboard as casually as a skilled musician would play a piano. Their course altered slightly; their speed increased. Curving wings on their seat backs folded forward and encircled them snugly. A transparent canopy glided over them. The pilot grinned a leering, toothless grin.

“Look, friend—I don’t want to run away,” Karvel said.

The pilot grinned, and spoke more gibberish. Karvel gestured unavailingly in the direction of the rapidly receding city. They sped onward, still at a nerve-shattering twelve-foot altitude.

“Am I being rescued or kidnapped?” Karvel demanded. He glanced backward, and snapped, “Get some altitude, you fool!” The other aircraft had taken up their pursuit.

Several large planes converged above them. One at a time they began to dart down in swooping passes. Head twisting, eyes aglow with ecstatic delight, the pilot wove his way skillfully between the thrusts, changed direction, stood the plane on edge, even managed to gain a little altitude. The city was far behind them, now—no more than a reflected glow on the horizon. Ahead of them the level stubble of the grainfield ended abruptly at the feet of heavily forested hills.

Seconds later two of the pursuing planes managed a coordinated attack, boxed them in neatly, and forced them down into the forest. They plowed through heavy foliage, tilted, spun crazily, and slid to the ground, coming to rest wedged at a steep angle between two trees.

The canopy opened, the seats unfolded, and the pilot stood up to peer about him in apparent perplexity.

“This is what comes of not taking altitude when you can get it,” Karvel told him disapprovingly.

It was no mere forest that they had crashed into, but a dense jungle. The trees were enormous, and their huge leaves blotted out the sky and produced an effect of eerie twilight. Their trunks bulged with strange fungus growths, and thick curtains of leaves hung motionless on long, ropelike vines. A noisy cloud of small insects churned in a shaft of sunlight.

The pilot leaped to the ground and studied the plane with cocked head.

“If it’s a question of getting out of this predicament,” Karvel said, with a mystified glance at the control keyboard, “you’ll have to work it out for yourself. I move that we start walking.”

He climbed down himself, lifted out his knapsack and rifle, and took a few suggestive steps. The pilot, still surveying the plane from the vantage point of his eight feet of height, ignored Karvel.

A curtain of vines parted, and a man stepped through. Enormously tall, bald, toothless, he could have been the pilot’s brother except for his dark-hued skin and his clothing. He wore the same type of flapping garment, but his was a dark brown, irregularly splashed with darker blotches. He carried two long poles, each of them tipped with a long, vicious-looking barbed spike.

Other men appeared noiselessly. Soon there were seven of them, standing beside the plane and talking excitedly with the pilot. Karvel withdrew to the opposite side, where he could feel somewhat less like a midget.

The pilot climbed back into the plane and closed the canopy, and it lifted slowly. As it turned edgewise and drifted free, the forest men went to work with their poles, hooking vines away from it and clearing a path. The plane floated off through the jungle at a walking pace, with the men moving ahead in relays to clear the way for it.

Quickly they disappeared. Karvel stood contemplating the wall of greenery that closed after them, but only for a moment. He had lost his sense of direction in their spinning descent, and the forest impressed him as an excellent place in which to get lost. He hurried to overtake them.

The ground began to rise steeply. The procession zigzagged among the trees, and finally, after a long climb, broke through into a small clearing where vines and undergrowth had been removed but the dense overhead foliage left untouched. Three forest roads converged there, broad, arched tunnels that vanished in sweeping detours around the gigantic trees. The pilot set the plane down and climbed out, and the entire party moved single file up a ramp that spiraled around a tree at the edge of the clearing.

Karvel followed gingerly, and cursed his curiosity long before he reached the top. The ramp was woven of thick fiber and supported by huge pegs driven into the tree. It sagged alarmingly between its supports, and the fiber parted when Karvel attempted to use his cane. The tree’s bark was too smooth and slippery to afford a handhold. Karvel fell far behind the others, but eventually he caught up with them at a platform fixed high up in the treetop.

The jungle stretched away at his feet like a green sea stirred whimsically by a gentle wind. Beyond lay the harvested grainfield, and drawn up near the edge of the forest was the vanguard of an army. Large aircraft were landing, disgorging their cargos of men, taking off again. The newcomers hurried to extend the long ranks of waiting troops.

On the crowded platform the forest men talked quietly. One was studying the assembling army with an optical device. The pilot grinned at Karvel, signaled with a jerk of his head, and turned away. Karvel stepped cautiously after him, and found the descent even more nerve-wracking than the climb.

As they gained the clearing again a group of men approached along one of the roads, their poles shouldered like enormous rifles. At a shouted command they vanished into the forest, leaving not so much as a swaying vine to mark their passage.

The pilot beckoned to Karvel from the plane, but he stood watching dumbly as another group of men approached the clearing. No one, he told himself, not even a Bowden Karvel with mountains in his soul, could possibly blunder an important diplomatic mission
this
badly.

His arrival had smashed a city, and killed or maimed untold thousands of its citizens.

And then, within two hours, his presence had precipitated a war.

Wearily he climbed into the plane. Tilted at a steep angle, they flew off along a forest road. The packed earth of the road unrolled monotonously beneath them, and the dim, unchanging greenery of the tunnel walls floated past in a hypnotic blur. Karvel found himself struggling to stay awake. He needed urgently to plan, to make decisions, to act, but fatigue had paralyzed his mental processes. He felt an overwhelming weight of exhaustion from the centuries he had—perhaps—passed through. His head nodded again, and he succumbed to the drowsiness that was enveloping him, and slept.

The eerie forest twilight was shading into forest night when the pilot shook him awake. Dimly he could make out another clearing, with several aircraft parked around its perimeter. He gathered up his equipment and followed the pilot, attempting to stomp himself awake. The footing changed abruptly from soft forest turf to hard ground, and ahead of them a door creaked as the pilot opened it. A few steps in total darkness, and another door opened onto a blaze of light.

Karvel’s eyes quickly recovered, but the shock he received from his surroundings lasted longer. Future man had returned to the cave.

He blinked incredulously at the high, jagged arch of the ceiling. Bands of brilliant yet soft artificial light crisscrossed it. An alcove contained what appeared to be startlingly advanced communications equipment. At one side of the room food sizzled on an enormous, gleaming grill, and the men of the forest were helping themselves with casual dips of long-handled tongs—and dropping the portions of food into crude wooden bowls, from which they ate with their fingers.

Long, wicker-like benches were scattered about the huge room, and the grinning pilot led Karvel to one of them, and got him seated. The forest men gathered around him. With the open curiosity of children they touched his hair, touched his clothing, ran their fingers along the barrel of his rifle, seemed fascinated with his cane. As one stepped back, apparently satisfied, another took his place.

The pilot returned to offer Karvel a bowl of deeply browned balls of food. He accepted with a nod of thanks, and cautiously placed one in his mouth. It disintegrated into a thick paste before he could begin to chew it. A highly appropriate food, he thought, for a people who had no teeth and—what was it the report had said?—no stomachs. “Prechewed and predigested meat balls,” he told himself wryly.

But he doubted that they were made of meat. The taste was strong and not unpleasant, with a vaguely familiar flavor that he could not identify. He washed the mouthful down with a drink of a mildly fermented fruit juice, and began to eat hungrily.

The pilot had disappeared; the forest men drifted away and went about their own affairs, which involved much coming and going. In the full light Karvel realized for the first time that their dark faces were green-tinted, as were the blotches on their clothing. There were fewer of them in the room than he had thought. Their tremendous size, and his dazzled senses, had combined to magnify an under-strength platoon into a company.

He searched vainly for a sign that one of those present was a person with authority, and regretted that he could not ask, tritely, to be taken to their leader. His first brushes with the language barrier had left him shaken and discouraged, and convinced that Haskins should have sent a linguist.

For a time he occupied himself with checking over his equipment. Nothing seemed damaged, not even his flashlight. He packed it away again, wondering if the pressure he experienced could possibly have been a sensorial illusion. Certainly there had been nothing illusionary about the condition of the other U.O. passengers.

The night wore on slowly, and Karvel stretched out on the bench’s uncomfortably ridged surface and attempted to inventory the errors he had made since his arrival. Finally he reduced them to one: he should not have left the U.O.; but he could not retrace his steps without passing through, or over, two hostile armies.

Dawn was no more than an hour or two away when the pilot came for him. He allowed himself to be led without protest through the Stygian forest night to the plane. The seat closed about him, the canopy closed, and they waited silently in the darkness.

A star flashed overhead and disappeared. Karvel stared in that direction, and saw it again. And again. Planes were taking off, parting the forest foliage as they ascended. Six times he saw the star, and then they rose slowly and brushed through the trees into the night sky.

There were patches of stars visible through the clouds, but no moon. “Moon?” Karvel exclaimed. “How do I know that there
is
a moon?”

He squinted into the darkness, trying to pick out their escort, but there were no shadows hovering near them. Probably the six planes had been decoys, sent out to draw off any pursuit.

“Get some altitude!” he growled.

They were skimming low over the forest, and soon the first light of dawn showed in what Karvel hoped was the east. Then the forest ended abruptly. There were cultivated fields below, and on the horizon loomed another city.

Chapter 2

First an ultramodern factory; then a surrealistic cathedral.

The city glowed with a softly rich, stained-glass blending of colors. Its spirally fluted towers culminated mushroomlike in great, circular platforms that marched in ascending order toward the looming authority of a central tower. It was a single enormous building that covered square miles, and yet Karvel’s remembrance of the unending expanse of the first city made it seem tiny.

They settled slowly onto one of the towers, hovering for a moment until the waiting throng parted to give them landing room. As soon as his seat released him Karvel climbed out with as much dignity as circumstances permitted, snapped to attention, bowed.

Here, finally, were the men he was seeking.

They were old, old men, with gaunt, deeply wrinkled faces, and each face was ludicrously ornamented with a brightly colored, flowing beard. One of them—his beard was a lovely robin’s-egg blue—stiffly returned Karvel’s bow, and spoke gibberish. His hands waved excitedly and his long, meticulously shaped, polished fingernails flashed knifelike with every gesture.

The oration attained a bleating climax, and subsided. Karvel bowed into the expectant silence that followed. “I don’t understand,” he announced.

Bluebeard returned the bow, and the entire company followed a spiral ramp far down into the tower. Karvel prudently carried all of his equipment with him, and no one objected, or even showed signs of curiosity.

They gathered in a windowless, octagonal conference room, where multicolored walls and ceiling diffused flowing patterns of colored light. Unbearded attendants passed among them, distributing bowls of food that looked and tasted like diluted, predigested mush. To refuse could have been a breach of etiquette, so Karvel accepted one, and drank its contents, forcing himself not to gag.

The long-bearded elders of the reception committee retired to the background, and a procession of men with shorter beards took their places. They spoke and chanted and sang gibberish at Karvel, and eventually he realized that they were trying different languages on him. He failed to isolate a single intelligible sound. After each performance he shook his head, and said, “I don’t understand.”