Time War E-Book

Lin Carter

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 238

Beschreibung

John Lux was an electronic scientist, a level-headed industrialist, an ordinary twentieth-century man—at least he thought he was an ordinary man...until he discovered he could teleport himself!
...Until he discovered that forces 200,000 years beyond his time were trying to destroy him! Until he discovered that civilization of the future was being pampered into extinction in a kindergarten world -- and he was the only man in all eternity who could save it!

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

DEDICATION

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

AUTHOR’S NOTE

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 1974 by Lin Carter.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

DEDICATION

This book is for my old friend JOE SCHAUMBURGER

who loves this kind of van-Vogtian puzzle-yarn as much as I do.

CHAPTER I

The Impossible Murderer

JOHN LUX lifted his eyes from the sheaf of subelectronic specifications he had been studying, and stared directly into the muzzle of a revolver.

The expensively decorated executive suite was untenanted, save for himself. The large room was almost soundless, except for the hum of the air conditioning and the distant chatter of typewriters in the outer offices, beyond the heavy mahogany door. He blinked and looked again, too completely astonished to move, to cry out, or even to think.

In a detached manner, almost as if part of an audience watching an enactment, or an observer looking on as these things happened to someone else, he noted that the gun was a Colt .45 automatic, similar to the one that lay in the bottom drawer of his own desk.

His mind veered giddily away from the element of the impossible. Nevertheless, the gun hung there in mid-air before his desk, suspended in emptiness, without any visible support.

And that was craziness; such things did not, could not, happen!

Yet there it was.

Slanting rays of sunlight, shining through the long slats of the Venetian blinds that showed through the heavy, half-parted drapes, glittered along the blued steel of the gun barrel. It was not, could not be, an illusion; this was solid. This was real.

A moment ago he had been absorbed in his plant engineers’ report on the subelectronic guidance system for a new ICBM prototype missile the government had contracted with his firm to produce. A moment before, the world had been ordinary-prosaic—even a little dull.

Now he was thrust into a living nightmare.

The revolver did not waver in the slightest. It was as rigid as if clenched in the grip of an invisible hand!

These were the thoughts that flashed through his mind in the first half-second as he stared directly into the cold, black, unwinking eye of the pistol barrel.

Then a metallic click rang loudly through the tense stillness of the office. It was as if an invisible finger had clicked off the safety catch. As fascinated as if he were staring into the eye of a cobra, John Lux saw the trigger move ever so slightly. He knew, with the finality of utter conviction, that in the next split second a bullet would go crashing into his brain.

He knew, also, that he could never throw himself aside in time to avoid that bullet.

The room roared with the thunder of a single gunshot—

—and Lux inexplicably found himself standing in the corner of the far wall, thirty feet from his desk, braced on trembling legs, panting and soaked with sweat, as if exhausted by some athletic feat, some physical ordeal of almost superhuman effort.

The room swam about him drunkenly; he seized the back of an expensive Swedish Modern couch to steady himself until the vertigo passed. Mastering his amazement, he looked down at himself, dreading what he might find.

And found—nothing!

No blood, no wound. Neither his suit nor his shirt front bore the marks of powder burns. It was as if the entire experience had been some elaborate joke, some enormous hoax. Or as if he had only dreamed the thing, and had not really experienced it in actuality.

But this was madness! There was no doubt in his mind that what had seemed to happen had really occurred. Lux was a hard-headed man, an electronic scientist, a successful businessman, a powerful industrial magnate. He had clawed his way up from the bottom of the heap, and had reached his present pinnacle of achievement because of his unique and valuable combination of the businessman’s practicality and the scientist’s imagination. Dreams—magic and mysticism, the occult and the inexplicable—had no room in his life.

He believed in what his senses told him was hard and real, and he had only contempt for fuzzy speculation and dreamy theorizing. Now he was confronted with a situation in which his senses had reported a reality that was impossible—that must, therefore, be empty illusion! For an instant, he toyed with the seductive thought of hallucination; in the next instant, with reluctance, he rejected it.

For the gun had fired! No slightest doubt of that fact existed in his mind. The roar of the explosion still rang in his ears; the sharp stench of cordite stung his nostrils.

Swiftly, he glanced across the room to where the pistol had hung in mid-air.

But it was gone!

It had winked out of existence a fraction of a second after it had fired at him.

The faint clatter of typewriters had ceased in the room beyond. A sudden clamor or shrill, questioning voices came faintly to his ear. The door swung open and a young woman in a prim silk dress looked frantically about.

“Sir? Mr. Lux! Are you all right? We heard a—”

Some intuition he did not really understand bade him soothe his secretary’s alarm.

“Everything is all right, Miss Forrester. A slight accident. I was cleaning my pistol—the pistol I keep in my desk—and it fired accidentally. I guess I had forgotten it was loaded.”

He ushered the young woman out of his office, told her he did not wish to be disturbed, and returned to his desk. Had the whole thing been a dream of some kind? Had he dozed off momentarily, nodded over the technical report, and dreamed the entire incident?

John Lux smiled grimly, and a bit perplexedly. If so, his dreams had a remarkable power to infect others—for Miss Forrester had heard the gunshot, too! That could hardly be the answer.

On a sudden impulse, he unlocked a drawer in the mahogany desk and stared down at the blued-steel barrel of his Colt .45—a relic of his war years.

The reek of cordite, which lingered in the heavy drapes of the room, and hovered in the air above the expensive carpet, was particularly strong here. He reached down and took up the pistol, and froze as amazement lanced through him.

The barrel was hot, stinging his fingertips!

He sniffed the muzzle, then snapped the breech and counted the cartridges. One bullet had been fired, and recently. The conclusion was inescapable . . .

The weapon that had sought his life was his own gun!

Shaken and unnerved by the inexplicable experience, Lux left the office, telling his secretary to cancel all appointments, as he was leaving for the day.

* * * *

He rode down to ground level in his private express elevator and strode out through the marble-paved lobby of the Lux Building and into the street. He could have called for his chauffeur, but he felt like walking. Fresh air and sunshine might clear his head.

The nearest bar was across the street, on the far corner of the block. He felt in such a dazed, bewildered mood that perhaps an ice-cold Martini would do him good. He strode through the early afternoon crowd to the corner, waited for the traffic light to change, and started across.

Some vague premonition, perhaps a blur of sudden movement at the periphery of his vision, made him glance suddenly over his shoulder.

Although the light was still green and the traffic stood immobile, waiting for the pedestrians to cross, one car had surged suddenly into motion. It was one of the new turbo cars, a huge, glittering machine, and it was bearing down at him with whirling speed.

The pedestrians to either side broke in a panic and scattered. But Lux stood as if rooted to the pavement, unable to move, unable even to think.

Like a gleaming, enormous projectile, the huge vehicle flashed toward him, swelling to gigantic proportions. In an instant his broken, mangled body would be slammed aside, flying through the air, to crash against the pavement, oozing crimson. He could not possibly leap clear; the car was almost on top of him; another instant and—

—he found himself suddenly on the sidewalk, clutching a lamppost, streaming with perspiration from every pore!

Raising his eyes, he saw the huge, gleaming turbo car race through the empty space his body had occupied a fraction of second before.

Cries and shouts of alarm sounded all about him, and the shrilling of a police whistle, the squeal of brakes. He shut his eyes, suddenly faint, and opened them as a huge hand clamped on his arm in a tight grip. A police officer, red-faced, stared at him.

“My God, it’s Mr. Lux! That was a close call—I could have sworn you were a goner—crazy hit-and-run maniac!” The officer broke off, red face puzzled. “But how did you jump out of the way in time! I could have sworn you—are you all right, sir? Shall I call an ambulance?”

Lux swallowed, and forced his will down like an iron vise on his trembling body.

“No—no need for that, Officer—thanks, but what I need right now is a drink!”

The interior of O’Leary’s was cool and dark, and it smelled of leather upholstery and expensive cigars. He chose a secluded table in a dark corner and gulped down a bitterly cold Martini and lit a cigarette, drawing the blue smoke deep into his lungs, letting it out slowly.

He supposed he was a brave man, but two attempts on his life within the span of thirty minutes is enough to shake up anyone! Ordering a second drink, he sat there and let the tension drain out of him slowly.

No businessman can rise as high as Lux, and as fast, without making enemies. Surely he had made a few. Not yet forty, he was at the helm of a giant industrial complex, with a finger in half a hundred pies. No doubt there were enough business rivals around who wished him in his grave!

For that matter, he held several top-secret defense contracts, too. There was that mysterious what-is-it they were putting together out in Farmersville—the robot nuclear missile. Half a dozen foreign powers would love to get their hands on the specifications for the missile—and would probably settle for having him put out of the way, and the corporation thrust suddenly into receivership, thus putting an end to the missile project.

But—no, neither business rivals nor international espionage was behind these mysterious assaults on his life, of that he was certain. For both of the mysterious attacks had savored of the inexplicable—the weird—even the occult. No visible murderer had leveled that pistol at his brain. And as for the incident of the turbo car, well, there had been an eerie shadow of the unknown cast across that incident, too. For as he had clung to the lamppost, watching the murder car hurtle through the vacancy where his body had been only a split second before, he had gotten a clear look into the driver’s seat.

And there had been no driver.

No one at all had been riding in the car that had tried to kill him!

Finishing his second drink, John Lux used the phone in the back of the bar and called for his chauffeur. A few minutes later a long black limousine pulled up, and Lux got in. The air conditioning was cool and tangy; the car glided into the stream of traffic.

Lux rubbed his brow, thinking. Today was Friday. The weekend lay ahead of him. He had planned to stay in his East Side town house this weekend, and had thought to call Marlene and make a date for dinner. But he felt too jumpy, too distraught. Suddenly, for some reason, he thought of Dr. Havering. It had been many months since he had last visited the older man, who had been one of his professors at college. A rare understanding had sprung up between the two men, so very different in age, in experience, even in temperament. Havering was the perfect companion for his mood; Lux felt a deep urge to discuss the inexplicable events of the day with some intelligent, first-class mind, to talk things out.

He remembered, too, and with a growing sense of excitement, that while Dr. Havering’s chosen field was in the area of behavioral psychology, he had for many years held a special interest in the odd, the uncanny, the inexplicable—the sort of “Fortean” phenomena which was known to occur, but which fitted none of the theories or laws of orthodox science. With Havering, he felt assured of a sympathetic ear and a mature understanding.

The Doctor, he recalled, had retired from teaching some years before, and lived in a secluded house on the edge of the city. Yielding to an irresistible impulse, Lux took up the interphone and directed his driver to pull over to the curb. He got behind the wheel, handed the man a twenty-dollar bill and told him to take a taxi home, and pulled away from the curb, leaving his chauffeur staring after him in puzzlement.

* * * *

The long drive out of the city gave Lux an opportunity to relax. Sunset painted the west with its crimson as Lux pulled off the highway into a private side road, traced a long curve past rows of great oaks, and pulled up before a large old house, all warm red brick, creamy stucco, and dark wood.

Havering’s man servant, a Filipino named Komo, answered the doorbell and admitted Lux into a dark hall. Heavy antique furniture gleamed with polished wax in the dim light; an excellent Persian carpet was luxuriously soft underfoot. In a moment the silent little man returned to lead Lux into the library, where the older man awaited him.

Havering had a tanned, lean face with aristocratic features and fine, intelligent eyes under a wide brow and smooth silver hair. He wore dark slacks and a black velvet smoking jacket.

“John, how splendid to see you again. What a nice surprise, your dropping in unexpectedly like this! Of course, you’ll stay for dinner . . . ?”

John Lux grinned. “I’ll stay the night, if you have no objections.”

“Objections! I’m delighted; it’ll give us a chance to have a good long talk. Come in—sit down—have a brandy and soda. You look fagged out. Working hard these days?”

“Hardly working, rather. The corporation literally runs itself.” Lux sat back in the comfortable embrace of the huge leather armchair and stretched his long legs out before the cheery fire that snapped and crackled in the fieldstone grate. Havering put a glass in front of him, took a seat himself, and began to stoke up a battered briar pipe. For a moment Lux just sat there, soaking up the warm atmosphere of the large, high-ceilinged room. Fine leather bindings stood in rows on the mahogany shelves; sunlight gleamed ruddily through the tall French windows. Marble-topped tables, cluttered with rare pieces of Chinese cloisonné, carvings of ivory, amber, and jade, scholarly journals and newspapers, lay about in the rich gloom.

Then he began to talk. He described both attempts on his life in an unemotional, dryly factual tone, being careful to remember and relate every detail with all the precision and clarity possible. As for the older man, he sat quietly, smoking, listening intently, not interrupting. When Lux finished, he sat back while Havering cleared his throat and rubbed the bridge of his nose thoughtfully.

“You’ve obviously come to me because of my study of such phenomena,” the Doctor observed. “Well . . . I’ve collected notes on such things for years—Fort’s books are full of them, of course. But I don’t have any pat answers, any neat theories, readily to hand.”

“Just what do you think, then?” Lux asked.

“Well, there are several obvious explanations that spring easily to mind—although I’d say we can rule them all out in your case. I know you too well to suggest that you are mentally deranged; your lifelong habits make it a virtual impossibility that you were drunk on alcohol or on some kind of narcotic and merely hallucinated both occurences; and the eyewitnesses in both events, your secretary, who heard the gunshot, and the police officer, who saw the car try to run you down, rule out the possibilities of it all being just a dream—unless your witnesses themselves are part of the dream.

“No . . . let’s consider that everything you have related to me this evening actually occurred, and just as you have described it. Someone—some person or organization, or some force—seems to want you dead. Any ideas who?”

Lux related his earlier suspicions regarding business rivals and foreign espionage, as well as his arguments against either of those elements being the power behind the enigmatic murder attempts.

Dr. Havering nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, it seems wildly improbable that General Nucleodynamics or Red China is out to murder you by means of voodoo or black magic! If such forces wanted to take your life badly enough to make an actual attempt on it, there are plenty of perfectly ordinary, mundane methods they would employ first, before turning to the occult.”

He suddenly shot a keen, appraising glance at Lux.

“You know, John, there’s one aspect to these phenomena we have not touched upon.”

“What’s that?”

“The methods of murder are certainly occult enough—but what about your peculiar way of avoiding death? You spoke of finding yourself instantaneously transported the length of your room, thus evading the gunshot—and a similar feat of teleportation carried you to the farther side of the street, snatching you from under the wheels of the hurtling automobile. Now this is something I perhaps know a little about! Teleportation is a known phenomenon, and the literature is filled with documented cases of individuals who have possessed the ability.”

“Teleportation? I’ve heard the word, but I know nothing about the occult,” Lux said. Havering shook his head.

“Teleportation is not in the least occult,” he said firmly. “It’s akin to the extrasensory faculties Rhine and his colleagues have studied for years at Duke. A paranormal motive power by which, in moments of stress, certain rare individuals are able to transport themselves, or exterior objects, across space instantaneously.”

Lux shrugged. “Sounds occult enough to me, Doc!”

“Nevertheless, there is nothing supernatural about it; it belongs to the province of paraphysics—the actions of an unknown force whose dynamics we have yet to figure out. Someday the math boys will have it all down in solid equations, just how and why it works. But right now, it’s still a mystery. And—have you forgotten, John?—this is not the first time you have teleported!”

Havering’s phrase triggered a memory that had slept in Lux’s mind for years. The instant the Doctor mentioned it, the memory came flooding back . . . more than fifteen years before, when a young tank commander serving in Korea, his vehicle had been trapped in a barrage of enemy mortar fire. An instant before their tank was blown to smithereens by a direct hit through the hatch, Lux’s observer had yelled a warning . . . a warning cut in half by a deafening explosion and a blinding flash of white fire . . . and Lux had blacked out momentarily, awakening to find himself knee deep in the muddy waters of a rice paddy, half a mile away, and well out of the danger zone.

The incident could easily have been explained away as a case of shell shock; half conscious, Lux could have staggered away from the wrecked tank, not recovering consciousness until he was well away from the scene of the explosion. And on such terms he had indeed explained it to his superiors when he had rejoined his unit. No one in the world, except himself and Dr. Havering, to whom he had told the story, knew his proof that such had not and could not have been the explanation.

For at the precise moment the artillery observer had yelled out his warning—an instant before the tank had shattered apart under the devastating impact of a direct hit by a mortar shell filled with powerful explosives—Lux had just happened to be glancing at his watch.

And when he had come to himself, to find he somehow stood up to his knees in the cold, muddy waters of a rice paddy, he was still engaged in the act of looking at the dial.

In the fraction of a second before the explosion had wrecked the tank, the second hand had been sweeping toward a numeral. Standing there with water seeping up his fatigues and soaking into his combat boots . . . the hand was still sweeping up to the same numeral!

It was only later, when he had oriented himself, and had learned that he had reappeared a good half-mile from his former position, that the full enigma of the experience came to him with all its brain-stunning implications.

Somehow, miraculously, he had traversed half a mile of space in an interval of time too minuscule to be measured by his watch!

How?

To this day he had never found the answer to that question.

CHAPTER II

The Lady Lis

JOHN LUX came awake suddenly, and for a moment he could neither identify the slight sound that had aroused him from sleep nor recognize his surroundings.

Then it came back to him . . . the puzzling events of the previous day, the drive to Dr. Havering’s house on the outskirts of the city, their conversation, and the weird, baffling conclusion they had tentatively arrived at—teleportation.

Komo had served them a superb gourmet dinner. Jonas Havering was a stimulating dinner companion, a brilliant conversationalist, a fountain of coruscating wit and ribald anecdote, and a rich fund of literary allusion. Lux had thoroughly enjoyed himself, and had drunk a bit more of the fine vintage wine than he perhaps should have—finishing the evening rather too late to drive back to his town house. The Doctor had asked Komo to open one of the seldom-used guest rooms for him, insisting that Lux spend the night.

Having donned a pair of the Doctor’s spare pajamas, he had retired, only to find it difficult to sleep. His mind a buzzing turmoil of theory and conjecture, he had lain awake a long time, staring at the ceiling, thinking.

Somehow, after a while he drifted slowly into a shallow, uneasy slumber, broken by vivid and menacing dreams.

What had awakened him? He lay rigid, conscious of the warm comfort of the huge double bed, of the darkness and cool silence of the room, wondering what it could have been that had jerked him so abruptly into wakefulness.

Then it came again—that faint, stealthy rustle of sound across the room.

He turned his head on the pillow, staring through the blackness toward the half-open window, where heavy drapes, tightly drawn, held the silver moon at bay, save for a vagrant sliver of pallid, brilliant light.

And, as he looked, John Lux saw a moving shape of darkness as it obscured that one sharp line of clear radiance.

Cold perspiration burst out on his body, which was clad only in the light sleeping garments.

Something had moved in the silent room. Something was moving between his bed and the window beyond.

The conclusion was unnerving, but terrifyingly obvious.

Another person beside himself was in the room. Some unknown intruder was creeping through the darkness toward him!

Lux had lived a hard, action-filled life, and had known danger and violence. He was a big man, deep-chested, tall, with heavily muscled shoulders, well able to handle himself in any kind of physical encounter. He tensed, steeling himself for confrontation with a burglar who might well be armed. Then, without a sound, moving carefully so as to give no warning, Lux reached across and switched on the lamp that stood on a small table beside the bed. The room was bathed in soft light, and to his surprise, Lux saw that the midnight intruder was—a woman! A young woman, darkly attractive, with alert, intelligent eyes in a cool, aristocratic face. Her slim figure was encased in a curious, tight-fitting one-piece garment of some darkly glittering fabric he could not recall having seen before.

She had been approaching the side of his bed in the dark. Now she stood tensely, blinking against the light which had unexpectedly flooded the room.

He relaxed a bit. The mysterious young woman was not armed, and he seemed in no immediate danger. In a loud voice, he demanded to know what she was doing there.

“I have no time to answer questions, John Lux,” the woman said swiftly, in a warm contralto voice. “I must ask you to listen very carefully to what I shall tell you. Already, there have been two deliberate attempts to take your life—”

“How do you know that?” he asked bluntly.

She shook her head impatiently, long dark hair tousling.

“Be silent and pay attention! It requires an enormous expenditure of energy to sustain my presence in this segment of reality. And if you are to survive the next scheduled attack on your life, you must possess certain information which only I can give you.”

“Very well, I’m listening.”

“That’s better! Now you must listen carefully to what I am going to tell you, for your survival—your very life—depend on your grasp of the fundamentals of the situation. You may think of me as the Lady Lis, if you like. I am not a native of your world, or of your century at all. I inhabit an alternate reality-segment of the very distant future, perhaps one million years from your own epoch. My era is known as the Arcadian Age, and represents the ultimate development of human civilization. But our reality segment is imperiled—”

Lux felt confused.

“What do you mean by ‘reality segment’?” he asked. She frowned impatiently.

“You must not interrupt—every moment is precious! Surely, even the savants of your primitive age must be aware that from every major Crisis Point— every really significant point of decision in time—alternate paths of future history branch off?”

Lux hazily remembered once idly leafing through a book of such nature, speculations of what “alternate realities” might have developed had Alexander the Great not died in Babylon of pneumonia but lived to consolidate his conquests and to organize his empire; had Napoleon broken Wellington at Waterloo and swept on to invade and conquer England; had Hitler’s scientists developed the atom bomb before the Manhattan Project and used the new weapon in his robot bombs to destroy London, Washington, Moscow, and New York. He nodded, hesitantly; the intense young woman swept on.

“Very well! Our world of the Arcadian Age is one such alternate branch of time. Its very existence is contingent upon a historical event which, according to our histories, occurred about two hundred thousand A.D.—to employ the curious chronological system used in your own era. This pivotal event is the destruction of Arthex the Living City, which liberated mankind from its gilded prison and forced our ancestors into the wilderness, where they learned to survive, rediscovering courage, endurance, and resourcefulness. Your enemy—the man striving to kill you—is known as Malaire. He is the master of the Living City, and the last great despot of the Urban Age, as the era is know. Malaire’s regime, circa two hundred thousand A.D., was a dead end for human civilization, and his overthrow liberated mankind into the Arcadian Age. But we Arcadians inhabit only one of several alternate realities: one is a dead, barren world, in which the last of Urban Age men dwindled and died out, and civilization came to an end; the other, a hideous metal world of robot intelligence, and there, too, mankind became extinct following the Urban Age.”

Her handsome features were pale and tense, her flashing eyes eloquent of despair.

“Each of these alternate reality-segments has an equal Probability Potential of becoming ‘actual history.’ Recently our sages have determined that the Crisis Point—the destruction or continuance of the Living City—is too nebulous for absolute certainty; it was resolved that we must influence and shape the flow of events in what is, to us, remote antiquity, to insure that Arthex indeed falls, as related in our histories.”

Lux’s mind felt numb; this mass of nearly incomprehensible information bewildered him.