The Legion of Time Read online

  THE LEGION OF TIME

  JACK WILLIAMSON

  A PYRAMID BOOK

  PYRAMID BOOKS are published by Pyramid Publications, Inc.,

  444 Madison Avenue, New York,

  New York 10022, U.S.A.

  Le Scrob

  THE LEGION OF TIME

  Chapter I - Appointment at The River

  The begining of it, for Dennis Lanning—the very beginning of his life—was on a hushed April evening of 1927. Then eighteen, Lanning was slender and almost delicately featured, with straw-yellow hair which usually stood on end. He usually wore a diffident smile; but his gray eyes could light with a fighting glint, and his wiry body held a quick and unsuspected strength.

  In that beginning was the same fantastic contrast that ran through the whole adventure: the mingling of everyday reality with the stark Inexplicable.

  Lanning, that last term, shared a Cambridge apartment with three other Harvard seniors, all a year or two older. Wilmot McLan, the mathematician, was a lean grave man, already absorbed in his work. Lap Meng Shan, proud but soft-spoken son of a mandarin of Szechwan, was eagerly drinking in the wonders of modern engineering. Good friends and swell fellows, both. But the one who stood closest to Lanning was Barry Halloran.

  Gigantic red-haired All American tackle, Barry was first and last a fighter. Some stern bright spirit of eternal rebellion he and Lanning shared together. That spring the sky was still an exciting frontier, and they were taking flying lessons at the East Boston airport.

  All three were out, however, on this drowsy Sunday evening. The house was still, and Lanning sat alone in his room, reading a thin little gray-bound book. It was Wilmont McLan’s first scientific work, just published at his own expense. Reality and Change, he had called it, and this copy was inscribed, “To Denny, from Wil—a stitch in time.”

  Its mathematics was a new language to Lanning. He leaned back in his chair, with tired eyes closed, trying to form some clear picture from the mist of abstruse symbols. McLan had quoted the famous words of Minkowski:

  “Space in itself and time in itself sink to mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two retains an independent existence.” If time, then, were simply another extension of the universe, was tomorrow as real as yesterday? If one could leap forward—

  “Denny Lanning!”

  A voice had spoken his name. Dropping the book, he sat upright in the chair. He blinked and swallowed; a quick little shudder ran up and down his spine. The door was still closed, and there had been no other sound. But a woman was standing before him on the nig.

  A girl… beautiful!

  A plain white robe swept long to her feet. Her hair was a shining mahogany-red, confined in a circle of something blue and brilliant. The composure of her perfect face seemed almost stern; but, behind it, Lanning felt—agony.

  Before her, in two small hands, she held an object about the size and shape of a football but shimmering with deep inner splendors, like some incredible diamond.

  Her grave eyes were on Lanning. They were wide, violet. Something in their depths—a haunting dread, a piercing, hopeless longing—stabbed him with pity for her. Then amazement came back, and he stumbled to his feet

  “Hello!” he gasped. “Yes, I’m Denny Lanning. But who are you?” His glance went to the locked door behind her. “And how’d you get inside?”

  A faint smile touched the white cameo of her face.

  “I am Lethonee.” Her voice had an unfamiliar rhythm, a lilt that was almost song. “And I am not really in your room, but in my own city, Jonbar. It is only in your mind that we meet, through this.” Her eyes dropped to the immense jewel. “And only your study of time enabled me to reach you now.”

  Open-mouthed, Lanning was drinking in the slim clean youth of her, the glory of her hair, her calm deep loveliness that was like an inner light.

  “Lethonee—” he murmured, relishing the sound. “Lethonee—”

  Dream or not, she was beautiful.

  A quick little smile, pleased and tender, flickered across her troubled face.

  “I have come a long way to find you, Denny Lanning,” she said. “I have crossed a gulf more terrible than death to beg for your help.”

  A queer, trembling eagerness had seized him. Incredulity struggled with a breathless hope. A throbbing ache was in his throat, so that he couldn’t speak. He walked uncertainly to her, and tried to touch the slim bare arms that held the shining object. His quivering ringers found nothing but air.

  “I’ll help you, Lethonee,” he gulped at last. “But how?” Her silver voice sank to an awed, urgent whisper. From the startling whiteness of her face, the great violet eyes seemed to look far beyond the room.

  “Because destiny has chosen you, Denny Lanning. The fate of the human race is on your shoulders. My own life is in your hand, and the doom of Jonbar.”

  “Eh!” Lanning muttered. “How’s that?” He rubbed his forehead, bewilderedly. “Where’s Jonbar?”

  His wondering dread increased, when the girl said: “Look into the time crystal and I can show you Jonbar.”

  She lifted the huge jewel. Her eyes dropped to it. And colored rays shattered from it, blindingly. It exploded into a prismatic glare. The fire-mist slowly cleared, and he saw—Jonbar!

  The lofty, graceful pylons of it would have dwarfed the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Of shimmering, silvery metal, they were set immensely far apart, among green parklands and broad, many-leveled roadways. Great white ships, teardrop-shaped, slipped through the air above them.

  “That is my Jonbar, where I am,” the girl said softly. “Now let me show you the city that may be—New Jonbar—lying far-off in the mists of futurity.”

  Bright flame veiled the city, and vanished again. And Lanning saw another more wondrous metropolis. The green hills along the horizon were the same. But the towers were taller, farther apart. They shone with clean soft colors, against the wooded parks. The city was one artistic whole; and its beauty caught his breath.

  “New Jonbar!” the girl was breathing, reverently. “Its people are the dynon.”

  There were fewer ships in the air. But Lanning now saw tiny figures, clad it seemed in robes of pure bright flame, launching themselves from lofty roofs and terraces, soaring above the parks in perfect, wingless freedom.

  “They fly through adaptation to the dynat” she whispered. “A power that makes them almost immortal. God-like! They are the perfect race to come.”

  Prismatic flame hid the vision. The girl lowered the crystal in her hands. Lanning stepped back. He blinked at the

  reading lamp, his books, the chair behind him. From that old, comforting reality, he looked back to the white wonder of the girl.

  “Lethonee—” He paused to catch his breath. “Tell me, are you real?”

  “As real as Jonbar is.” Her voice was hushed and solemn. “You hold our destiny, to give us life or death. That is a truth already fixed in the frame of space and time.”

  “What—” Lanning gulped. “What can I do?”

  Dread was a shadow hi her eyes.

  “I don’t know, yet. The deed is dim in the flux of time. But you may strike for Jonbar—if you will. To win or to perish. I came to warn you of those who will seek to destroy you—and, through you, all my world.”

  The rhythm of her voice was almost a chant, a prophecy of evil.

  “There is the dark, resistless power of the gyrane, and black Glarath, the priest of its horror. There is Sorainya, with her hordes of fighter slaves.”

  Lethonee had become almost stern. Sadness darkened her eyes, yet they flashed with unquenchable hatred.

  “She is the greatest peril.” Her voice lifted, like a battle-chant. “Sorainya, the woman of war. She is the evil flo
wer of Gyronchi. And she must be destroyed.”

  Her voice fell, and Lethonee looked at Lanning, over the giant crystal, her white face filled with a tender and almost childish concern.

  “Or else,” she finished, “she will destroy you, Denny.”

  Lanning looked at her a long time. At last, hoarse with a sudden emotion, he said: “Whatever is going to happen, 13

  I’m willing to help—if I can. Because of you. But what—what am I to do?”

  “Beware of Sorainya!” Those words were bugle notes, but then her voice dropped appealingly. “Denny, make me one promise. Promise you won’t fly tomorrow.”

  “But I’m going to!” Lanning protested. “Max—he’s the instructor—says Barry and I can solo tomorrow, if the weather’s right. I couldn’t miss it.”

  “You must,” said Lethonee.

  Lanning met her violet eyes. A surge of unfamiliar feeling swept away some barrier between them. He looked into her very heart—and found it beautiful.

  “I promise,” he whispered. “I won’t fly.”

  “Thank you, Denny.” She smiled and touched his hand. “Now I must go.”

  “No!” Alarm took Lanning’s breath. “I don’t know half enough. Where you are, really. Or how to find you again.-You can’t go!”

  “But I must.” A shadow fell on her face. “For Sorainya could follow me here. And if she finds that the crisis turns indeed on you, she will strive to take you—or even destroy you. I know Sorainya!”

  “But—” Lanning gulped. “Will I see you again?”

  “Your hand is on the wheel of time,” she said, “and not mine.”

  “Wait!” gasped Lanning. “I—”

  But the fire of a million sunlit prisms had burst again from the jewel in her hands. Lanning was momentarily dazzled, blinded. And then he was alone in the room, speaking to vacant air.

  Dream—or reality? The question racked him. Could she have been an actual person, come across the gulf of time from the remote possible future? Or was he crazy? Dazed, he picked up the little gray book, and reread a paragraph of Wil McLan’s:

  “To an external observer, gifted with four-dimensional senses, our quadraxial universe must appear complete, fixed, and forever unchanging. The sweep of time is no more than the hand of a subjective watch; it is no more than the intangible ray of consciousness, illuminating human experience. In any absolute sense, the events of yesterday and tomorrow are alike eternal, immutable as the structure of space itself.”

  But the haunted loveliness of Lethonee rose against the page. How did that fit with her tale of worlds that might be, striving for existence?

  He flung aside the book, helped himself to a generous slug of Barry Halloran’s Irish whisky, and walked blindly down through Harvard square. It was late when at last he came in to bed, and then he slept with a dream of Lethonee.

  He wanted to tell Barry, next morning; for they had been closer than brothers. But he thought the big redhead would only laugh—as he himself might have laughed if another had told him the thing. And he didn’t want laughter at that dream, not even from Barry.

  Half sick with a confusion of wonder and doubt, of hopeless hope for another glimspe of Lethonee and bitter dread that she had been all illusion, Lanning tried to read a textbook and found himself aimlessly walking the room.

  “Buck up, kid!” Barry boomed at him. “I never thought you’d be shaky—Max says you’ve got the nerves of a hawk.

  I’m the one that should be turning green around the gills. Come out of it, and let’s catch some sparrows.”

  Lanning stood up, uncertainly—and then the phone rang. He had made his own expenses, that year, covering university activities for a Boston paper; and this was his editor. It was an assignment that could have been evaded. But, listening, he saw the tragic eyes of Lethonee.

  “Okay, Chief,” he said. “On the job.” He hung up and looked at Barry. “Sorry, old man. But business first. Tell Max I’ll be out tomorrow. And happy landings, guy.”

  ‘Tough luck, kid.”

  The big tackle grinned, and crushed his hand, and ambled out.

  Lanning read in his own paper, four hours later, that Barry Halloran was dead. The training plane had gone out of control, two thousand feet over Boston harbor, and plunged down into the Charles River channel. Grappling hooks had brought part of the battered wreckage up out of the mud, but the body had not been recovered.

  Lanning shut his eyes against the black headlines, reeling. He was sick with a dread that was almost terror, numbed with a black regret. For Lethonee had saved his own life, he knew—but at the cost of Barry Halloran’s.

  Chapter II - The Corridor of Time

  Laning felt no gratitude for the warning that had saved his life, but rather a sick regret, an aching sense of guilt for Barry’s death. Yet he could feel no actual resentment toward Lethonee—the tragedy seemed a terrible proof of her reality. In her grave and troubled beauty, surely, there had been no evil.

  A kind of excitement buoyed up Lanning for a few days, and made his grief endurable. There was his hope that she would come back—her memory was a haunting pain of loneliness, that would not die. Even her enigmatic warning, and his vague expectancy of unknown perils lent a certain spice to existence.

  But life went on, after the funeral preached for Barry’s unrecovered body, as if Lethonee had never come. Lao Meng Shan turned to China, eager to put his new science at her service. Wil McLan was off to Europe, on a fellowship in theoretical physics.

  And Lanning presently embarked for Nicaragua, where American marines were straightening out the Sacasa-Chamorro fracas, on his first foreign press assignment. Barry’s uncle had offered him an advertising job. But a burning unrest filled him, born of the conflicts within him, of doubt and hope, wonder and grief, dread and bitter longing. He saw no way ahead, save to break old ties, to forget.

  It was on the little fruit steamer, bound for Corinto, that he first saw—Sorainya! And knew, indeed, that he had not dreamed, that he would never forget, nor ever escape the strange web of destiny flung across space and time to snare him.

  Velvet night had fallen on the tropical Pacific. The watch had just changed and now the decks were deserted. Lanning, the only passenger, was leaning on the foredeck rail, watching the milky phosphorescence that winged endlessly from the prow.

  But his mind saw, instead, Lethonee’s jewel of time, and her slim haunting form behind it. And it startled him strangely when a ringing golden voice, in pealing mockery of her own, called:

  “Denny Lanning!”

  His heart leaped and paused. He looked up eagerly, and hope gave way to awed wonderment. For, flying beside the rail, was a long golden shell, shaped like an immense shallow platter. Silken cushions made a couch of it, and lying amid them was a woman.

  Sorainya—woman of war!

  Lethonee’s warning came back. For it was a warrior queen hi the shell, clad in a gleaming crimson tunic of woven mail that swelled with her womanly curves. A long thin sword, in a jeweled sheath, lay beside her. She had put aside a black-plumed, crimson helmet, and thick masses of golden hair streamed down across her strong bare arms.

  The white tapered fingers, scarlet-nailed, touched some control on the low rim of her strange craft, and it floated nearer the rail. Upraised on the pillows and one smooth elbow, the woman looked up at Lanning, smiling. Her eyes were long and brilliantly greenish. Across the white beauty of her face, her mocking lips were a long scarlet wound, voluptuous, and malicious.

  Flower of evil—Lethonee’s words again. Lanning stood gripping the rail, and a trembling weakness shook him. As if hi a dream, swift, unbidden desire overcame his incredulity. He strove desperately to be its master.

  “You are Sorainya?” He held his tone grave and low. “I had warning to expect you.”

  She sat up suddenly amid the cushions, as if a whip had nicked her. The green eyes narrowed, and her body was tense and splendid in the gleaming .mail. Her red mouth became a thin line of sc
orn.

  “Lethonee!” She spat the name. “So that slut of Jonbar has found you?”

  Lanning flushed with anger, and his fingers drew hard on the rail. He remembered the cold glint of an answering hate in the eyes of Lethonee, and her stern statement, “Sorainya must be destroyed.”

  “So you are angry, Denny Lanning?” Her laugh was a mocking chime. “Angry, because of a shadow? For Lethonee is but a phantom, seeking with lies and tricks to live—at the cost of other lives. Perhaps you have discovered that?”

  Lanning shuddered, and wet his lips.

  “It’s true,” he whispered. “She caused Barry’s death.”

  The scorn had fallen like a mask from Sorainya’s face. Now she tossed her splendid head, and pushed back the tumbled glory of her hah*. The sea-green eyes danced an invitation, and she smiled.

  “Lethonee is no more than a spectre of possibility.” Her tone was a suave caress. “She is less than a single speck of dust, less than a shadow on the wall. Let’s forget her, Denny Lanning! Shall we?”

  Lanning gulped, and a tremor shook him.

  “But I am real, Denny.” Her bare arms opened, beckoning. “And I have come for you, to take you with me back to Gyronchi. That is a mighty empire, more splendid than the pallid dream of Jonbar. And I am its mistress.**

  She stood up with one flowing movement, tall and regal in the scarlet mail. Her bare arms reached out, to help Lanning to the golden shell. Her cool green eyes were shining with intoxicating promise.

  “Come, Denny Lanning. To rule with me in Gyronchi.”

  Lanning’s hands gripped the rail until his knuckles cracked. His heart was pounding, and he drew a long shuddering breath.

  “Why?” His voice rapped harsh and cold. “Of all men, why have you come for me.”

  The shell drifted closer, and Sorainya smiled. “I have searched all space and time for you, Denny Lanning. For we are the twain of destiny. Fate has given us the keys to power. Together on the golden throne of Gyronchi, we can never fail. Cornel”