The Time Trap (5 page)

Light came. They hung a thousand feet about the black, sullen waters of a sea that stretched to the horizon. There was no sign of land. In a black, star-studded sky loomed a globe of dull silver, incredibly vast. Its diameter covered fully a third of the heavens.

Mason said uncomprehendingly, “The Moon—but it’s close, Murdach—very close! How far in the future have we gone?”

Murdach’s face was white. He eyed the instruments, reached out a tentative hand, withdrew it. Hesitating, he said, “Something is wrong. I did not know—”

“Wrong?” The Sumerian growled an oath. “You said you’d mastered this hell-chariot!”

“I—I thought I had. But it is abstruse—Greddar Klon came from a more advanced world than mine.”

“We’re not—” Mason felt oddly cold as he asked the question. “We’re not marooned here, are we!”

Murdach’s lips tightened. He gripped a lever, swung it over. His slim fingers danced over the control panel. Nothing happened.

“For a while, at least,” he said at last. “I cannot send the machine into time. But soon I can discover what’s wrong, or at least I think so.”

Alasa smiled, though her eyes were frightened golden pools. “Then do your best, Murdach. The sooner you succeed, the sooner we’ll find the Master.”

“No, no,” Murdach told her impatiently. “We’ll find Greddar Klon in a certain time-sector. Whether we start now or in an hour or in fifty years will make no difference.”

“Fifty years!” Erech’s vulturine face was worried. “And in the meantime—what will we live on? What will we eat?”

Ten hours later the question reoccurred. Both Murdach and Mason were haggard and red-eyed from their calculations and their study of the time-ship’s principles. The former said at last, “How long this will take I don’t know. We’d better find food. Too bad we took none with us.”

“Where?” the Sumerian asked. He glanced around expressively at the bleak, lonely expanse of sea and Moon-filled sky. “I think Ran, the goddess of the Northmen, has claimed the world for her own. The ocean-goddess…”

“There’ll be land,” Mason said rather hopelessly as Murdach sent the ship lancing through the air. “If we go far enough.”

But it was no long distance to the shore—a flat, barren plain of grayish sandy soil, eroded to a horizontal monotony by the unceasing action of wind and wave. No mountains were visible. Only the depressingly drab land, stretching away to a dark horizon. And there was no life. No animals, no vegetation; a chill emptiness that seemed to have no end. The dreadful loneliness of it made Mason shudder a little.

“Is this the end?” he wondered softly, aloud. “The end of all Earth?”

Sensing his mood, though not comprehending the reason for it, Alasa came close, gripped his arm with slim fingers. “We’ll find food,” she said. “Somewhere.”

“We don’t need to worry about water, anyway,” he grunted. “It’s easy to distill that. And there’s—”

“
Hai!
”

Erech shouted, pointing, his pale eyes ablaze.

“Men—see? There—”

Below them, a little to the left of the drifting ship, a great, jagged crack loomed in the plain. There was movement around it, life—vague figures that were busy in the unchanging silvery twilight of a dying Earth.

“Men?” Murdach whispered. “No…”

Nor were they men. As the ship slanted down Mason was able to make out the forms of the strange creatures. Vaguely anthropoid in outline, there was something curiously alien about these people of a dying world.

“Shall we land?” Murdach asked.

Mason nodded. “Might as well. If they show signs of fight, we can get away in a hurry.”

The craft grounded with scarcely a jar near the great crack in the ground. Confusion was evident among the creatures. They retreated, in hurried confusion, and then a group of four advanced slowly. Through the transparent walls Mason scrutinized them with interest.

They were perhaps eight feet tall, with a tangle of tentacles that propelled them swiftly forward. Other tentacles swung from the thick, bulging trunk. The head was small, round, and without features—a smooth knob, covered with glistening scales. The bodies were covered with pale, pinkish skin that did not resemble human flesh.

Murdach said, “They are—plants!”

Plant-men! Amazing people of this lost time-sector! Yet evolution seeks to perfect all forms of life, to adapt it perfectly to its environment. In earlier days trees had no need to move from their places, Mason knew, for their food was constantly supplied from the ground itself. With the passing of slow eons perhaps that food had been depleted; limbs and branches had stretched out slowly, gropingly, hungrily. Painfully a tree had uprooted itself. The mutant had given life to others. And now, free of age-old shackles, Mason saw the plant-men, and fought down his unreasoning horror at the sight.

Murdach said, “Listen! I think they’re speaking to us—”

“Speaking?”

“With their minds. They’ve developed telepathy. Don’t you feel some sort of message?”

“I do,” Alasa broke in. “They’re curious. They want to know who we are.”

Mason nodded. “I don’t think they’re dangerous.” He opened the port, stepped out into the thin, icy air. A cold wind chilled him. Among the plant-men a little wave of panic came. They shrank back. Mason lifted his hand, palm outward, in the immemorial gesture of peace.

Within his mind a wordless message stirred. “Who are you? You are not of the Deathless Ones?”

At a loss, Mason answered aloud. “We are friends. We seek food—”

Again the strange fear shook the creatures. They drew back further. One stood his ground, blind glistening head turned toward the man, tentacles dangling limply.

“Food? What sort of food?”

They understood Mason’s thoughts, apparently. Conscious that he was on dangerous ground, he said, “Anything you can spare. What you eat—”

“Who are you?”

“We come from the past,” Mason answered at a venture. Would they understand that?

“You are not Deathless Ones?”

“No.” Mason sensed that the Deathless Ones, whoever they were, were enemies of the plant-men. And his reply seemed to reassure the creatures.

They conferred, and again their spokesman stood forward. “We will give you food, what we can spare. We are the Gorichen.” So Mason translated the plant-man’s thought message. There was more confidence in the creature’s mind now, he sensed.

“You must hurry, however. Soon the Wave will come…”

Puzzled, Mason nodded agreeably. “Bring what food you can spare, then.”

“You must come with us. We may not carry food to the surface.”

Mason considered, glanced back at the ship. “How far must I go?”

“Not far.”

“Well, wait a minute.” He went back to the others and explained what had happened. Murdach shook his head.

“I don’t like it.”

“They seem harmless enough. I’m not afraid of ’em. It’s probably the other way around. They’ll be glad to see the last of us. They’re in deadly fear of some creatures they call the Deathless Ones, and they think we’re related to them somehow.”

“Well—” Murdach rubbed his lean jaw. “If you’re not back soon, we’ll come after you.”

With a smile for Alasa, Mason leaped out through the port and approached the Gorichen. “I’m ready,” he told them. “Let’s get started.”

Keeping a safe distance from the man, the plant-creatures led him to the edge of the great earth-crack. A sloping ladder led down into the depths. Several of them began to descend it swiftly, and more gingerly Mason followed.

It grew darker. A hundred feet down the ravine narrowed to a silt-covered floor, into which Mason’s feet sank. The Gorichen led him toward a round metal disk, ten feet in diameter, that protruded from the ground. One of them fumbled at the disk with its pinkish tentacles. Silently metal slid aside, revealing a dim-lit hollow beneath.

Another ladder led down. At its bottom Mason found himself in a sloping corridor cut out of rock, leading into hazy distances. The plant-men urged him along this.

“How far?” Mason asked again.

“Soon, now.”

But it was fully half an hour later when the Gorichen halted before a gleaming door at the end of the passage. It opened, and beyond it Mason saw a vast and shining cavern, hot with moist warmth. A musky, strong odor blew dankly against his face.

“We feed here,” one of the Gorichen told Mason. “See?”

At a little distance was ranged a long row of flat, shallow basins let into the stone floor. Intense heat blazed down upon them. With the basins was a black-scummed, oily liquid. As Mason watched a plant-man marched forward on his tentacles and lowered himself into a tank. He remained there unmoving.

“The rays from the great lamps overhead give us strength,” a Gorichen told Mason with its thought-message. “Within the pits we have food, created artificially and dug out of our mines, dissolved in a liquor that aids the transmutation to chlorophyl.”

The arrangement was logical enough, Mason realized. Plant-food, absorbed through the roots—radiation from the huge lights in the cavern’s roof, a substitute for solar radiation, waning with the inevitable cooling of the Solar System. But such food was useless for human beings.

Mason said so. One of the Gorichen touched his arm with a soft tentacle-tip.

“It does not matter.”

“What?” A chill premonition shook Mason. He glanced around swiftly at the blankly shining heads of the plant-men. “What d’you mean?”

“You are to be used in our experiments, that is all.”

“Like hell!” Mason snarled—and struck. His fist crashed out, pulping the body of one of the Gorichen. Its flesh was horribly soft and fungoid. Moist, soft stuff clung to Mason’s hand. The Gorichen, a gaping hole in its torso, halted and then came forward again, apparently uninjured. And the others pressed toward the man, tentacles waving.

The battle was brief. Mason’s muscles were toughened with fury and desperation, but he had no chance against overwhelming numbers. So at last he went down; was bound tightly, still struggling, with flexible metal ropes. Then the plant-men retreated, and Mason saw something that made his throat dry with horror.

A group of Gorichen were carrying a figure into the cavern—the body of Alasa, bound and silent, bronze hair hanging in disheveled ringlets about her pale face. She saw Mason.

“Kent! They attacked us after you left! They killed Erech, I think. They—”

“Are you all right?” Mason asked, trying to regain his breath. “You’re not hurt?”

She shook her head. “No. But Murdach escaped in the ship.”

The Gorichen waited silently.

“Murdach escaped?” A little flare of hope mounted within Mason. Alasa seemed to read his thought.

“He can’t help. We’re under the ocean. These demons took me underground just as a great wave came out of the east…”

Now Mason realized why the plant-men dwelt underground. The Moon’s nearness caused giant tides that swept resistlessly over the surface of the planet. Now they were far beneath the sea—and would be, until the tide retreated.

Mason grimaced. He tugged unavailingly at his bonds. One of the Gorichen came forward. His thought-message was clear.

“We bear you no hatred. You say you are not of the Deathless Ones, our enemies. Yet you are very like them. For ages we have tried to find a way of defeating the Deathless Ones, and never yet have we succeeded. They cannot be captured. We cannot experiment on them. But you—if we find how you are vulnerable, we may use that knowledge on the Deathless Ones. Certain things we already know. Steel is useless. So are poisonous gases. But there are certain combinations of rays…”

The creature fell silent. His tentacles gestured, and the two captives were lifted, borne toward a glass block that towered near by. A door was opened in its side; Mason was thrust into its hollow interior. Cursing, he struggled with his bonds as the plant-men retreated with Alasa. Rolling over on his side, he peered through the transparent walls. And, watching, he went cold with horror.

To the Gorichen the two humans were guinea-pigs, valuable only as material for their experiments. They dragged Alasa to an altar-like block of stone. Vainly she fought.

The tentacles of the monsters reached out, deftly removing the girl’s clothing. In a moment she lay utterly nude, chained to the stone block so that she could scarcely move. A Gorichen wheeled a lens into position. From it a pale ray-beam fingered out, enveloping Alasa’s ivory body in lambent moonglow.

She was unconscious, or seemed so. For a second the ray was visible; then it snapped out. Working hurriedly, the plant-men unbound the girl, carried her to Mason’s prison, and thrust her within. They remained in little knots outside the glass walls, their blankly glistening heads inclined forward as though they stared attentively at the results of their experiment.

Cursing, Mason struggled to free himself. Useless attempt! The unyielding metal merely chafed and cut his wrists, and presently he stopped to glance at the girl. She was regaining consciousness.

She moaned, lifted a slim hand to brush bronze hair from her face. Slowly she opened her eyes. In them was a blind dreadful staring that made Mason catch his breath, his throat dry.

The girl dragged herself to her hands and knees. Her gaze moved questingly about the prison. She saw Mason.

Silently she crept forward. An angry flush was mounting in her face and bosom, and the glaring eyes grew wider.

“Alasa!” Mason called. “
Alasa!
”

No answer. The nude girl crawled toward him—and stopped. She arose.

Her breasts rose and fell more swiftly. A harsh cry came from her lips.

Then suddenly she sprang at him.

Mason was caught unawares. He felt soft flesh pressed against his face, fever-hot, caught a glimpse of Alasa’s flashing teeth, bared in a snarl. What madness had the Gorichen’s hellish ray worked?

Mason rolled away just in time as Alasa’s teeth drove at his throat. Finger-nails raked his face. Then Alasa leaped again, eyes blazing.

“God Almighty!” Mason groaned. Would he have to kill Alasa to escape being murdered? He drove the thought from his mind; he knew that he could never harm the girl even if she were insane. Yet, for her own sake, he must subdue her somehow. And he had little chance of doing that, bound as he was.