Lloyd Biggle Jr.: The Chronocide Mission

Arne pointed to himself. “Arne.”

“And you don’t understand English. ‘Saving Earth from destruction’ sounds serious,” he went on good-naturedly, “but surely it isn’t imperative to rescue it at this hour of the night. On the other hand, I certainly would like to know where that lens came from, and how it was made, and what it was used for. A pity you don’t speak English. Is there any other language we could communicate in? Parlez vous francais? Sprechen sie Deutsche? No? But I suppose the person who wrote this letter speaks English well enough. He says you have something to show me.”

Arne was gazing at him bewilderedly.

“Show me—” The professor glanced again at the letter. “Show me len.”

Arne got up and went to him, holding out Egarn’s weapon. He repeated the words Egarn had taught him. “Danger. Not touch. Look.”

Brock squinted carefully at the end that was extended to him. When he’d had time to recognize it as identical to the fragment he had seen, Arne obligingly let him see the len in the other end.

Brock got to his feet. “The letter also mentions a demonstration. De-mon-stra-tion. Never mind, I’m sure you know.”

He led Arne through rooms full of strangenesses, pausing along the way to take a handlight from a drawer. They exited through a rear door, and Brock’s handlight picked out a path. They moved past flower beds and a garden, past Brock’s workroom, and finally into a gully at the back of the property where a small stream flowed. Arne selected a huge boulder as his target. Lightning flashed, there was a crash of sound, and the professor hurried forward to wonderingly examine the smooth hole bored through stone. Arne waited, tube in his hand, in case another demonstration was needed.

It wasn’t.

Brock led him back to the house and to the room they had occupied before. “Wait,” he said and left Arne there. Arne seated himself and waited. He heard voices in a distant part of the house. Then the professor returned carrying a jacket.

“Are we going to the motel the stationery came from?” he asked. “I keep forgetting you can’t understand. Where—are— we—going? Where—”

Arne showed him his own piece of stationery.

“At least it’s a respectable address,” Brock said. “Let’s go.”

He led Arne through a different door and into a room where two automobiles were parked. They got into one of them, and Arne turned wide-eyed to watch the wall behind them rise up and fold against the beams overhead. They backed out and drove away.

The night-time strangeness looked just as confusing to Arne on the return trip. At the motel, Egarn responded to the signal Arne tapped. He greeted Brock warmly; the two shook hands. Then they sat down to talk.

And talk.

And talk.

Egarn used up the remaining stationery and much of his pocket notebook drawing diagrams. The two men forgot about Arne, who finally stretched out on the bed and fell asleep.

It was almost dawn when Egarn shook him awake. Brock was talking on the telephone. “He thinks we aren’t safe here,” Egarn said. “Probably he is right. If Gevis finds out where we are, it would be only too easy for him to land a company of Lantiff in the parking lot. One of us would have to keep alert all the time, and there are things that must be done. So we will check out immediately. Brock is asking friends to look after me. They will take me to a safe place—even Brock won’t know where are—but he can get in touch with me by telephone whenever he needs to. I know you wouldn’t enjoy being hidden away with nothing to do, so you can go with him. Help him as much as you can and guard him well—before this day is over, the Lantiff may be after him, too.”

“I can’t give him much help when I can’t talk with him,” Arne complained.

“You can recognize a Honsun Len when you see it. Except for me, you are the only person in the world—at this moment—who can.”

Brock hung up and turned to them. “Ready to go?”

He drove them to the office and waited outside with his motor running while the night clerk performed the necessary paperwork to check them out. Egarn explained that they had been called away by a business emergency but hoped to return in a day or two. The clerk diffidently accepted a large tip and breathed, “Yes, sir! We will be happy to have you back, sir.”

They drove away. After threading through the downtown area, Brock turned south on Mount Hope Avenue. “He hates war as much as we do,” Egarn told Arne. “He will see that the len is destroyed if he can find a way to do it. Separating us is his suggestion. Then if something happens to one of us, the other can fight on.”

They turned onto Joseph Wilson Boulevard. When they reached the university campus, a parked car blinked its lights at them. They slowed and came to a stop beside it. Egarn clasped Arne’s hand.

“I will be all right,” he said. “You are not to worry about me. You have a job to do.”

He stumbled awkwardly from the car, swung his own door shut behind him, and scrambled into the other car. Both vehicles drove away quickly.

Arne leaned back in the rear seat and worried about Egarn. He doubted Brock’s friends could be trusted to guard him properly. However capable they were, they would know nothing about dealing with an utterly ruthless Peer of Lant who possessed the means of sending an army through time. They wouldn’t even be able to imagine such a thing.

Brock, too, was worried about Egarn, but his concern was for the incredible tale Egarn had told. He wondered if he were the biggest fool in the universe for believing it. The weapon Arne carried in his pocket fully explained what had happened to the dead handyman and the police car. Unfortunately, it was an explanation that couldn’t be used, and no one would believe him without it. Egarn had furnished plenty of detail—including descriptions of the tools missing from Brock’s workbench after the strange lens had mysteriously disappeared—but no one would believe that, either.

Brock had no worries at all about Egarn’s safety. His friend was Colonel Jacques Lobert, a former army officer with police connections, and Brock had told him Egarn was a scientist connected with an ultra top-secret project. Espionage agents would certainly try to assassinate him if they got a chance. They had already killed two of his colleagues—maneuvered them into a police chase, and then, when that didn’t finish them off, cut their throats, as the colonel no doubt had read in the papers. A third man, the handyman Hy Hyatt, was also murdered, but Brock wasn’t at liberty to talk about that or about the method the fugitives had used to disable a police car. He didn’t have to—one of the newscasts had made a highly publicized reference to a death ray.

“They,” the espionage agents, were clever, fantastically competent, and completely ruthless. Egarn had to be taken to a hiding place with all of the slight-of-hand the colonel could manage, or he certainly would be followed. Then he had to be guarded, not by one man, but by several, with automatic weapons. “They” were capable of marshalling a small army if that quantity of brute force was required.

Brock and the colonel were were long-time friends and not given to practical joking, but the colonel still might have accused the tee-totaling professor of drinking too much had he not known how mystified the police were about those three deaths and the damage to the police car. “I’ll take the situation as you describe it,” he said. “But when this is over, I want a complete explanation.”

“You shall have it,” Brock promised. “There simply isn’t time for that now. This really is urgent.”