The Shadow Men Page 6

  From where she sat, manning the ship’s powerful spit-gun, Lela said, “It’s bright enough now. Try and lift her again.”

  It was a hope that had motivated their courage all through the long night—that morning would bring some life to the sluggish motors. The hope died a second later as Cargill eased in the power and pulled it all the way back. The ship did not even stir.

  “We’ll try it again,” said Lela in a tired voice, “when the sun comes up.” Cargill rejected her hope. “Has your father any influence with the bosses?” he asked.

  The girl shrugged. “Carmean kind of likes him.”

  Cargill silently wondered why. He said finally, “Maybe if we talked to them we could find out what they want.” From the conversation he had heard more than a month ago between Car-mean and the Shadow, Grannis, he had

  a rather sharp conviction they were after him.

  He said, “I think you’d better try to get your Pa on the”—he hesitated— "radio and see if he can come here. We’ll try to hold them off until he arrives and then, if possible, you can go with him.”

  Lela was pale. "What about you?”

  Cargill did not answer immediately. The feeling of vagueness that was inside him was only too familiar. It was the same kind of blur that had made it possible for him to swim ashore on the coast of Normandy. With that blurred feeling about his future he had entered all the subsequent battles in which he had been engaged.

  He said now, "I’ll try to slip away tonight after it gets dark.” He was about to elaborate when his gaze strayed past her toward the edge of the clearing a hundred feet away. A Shadow stood there.

  His face must have shown that something was wrong for Lela whirled. Her body grew rigid. The Shadow had been motionless as if observing the scene. Now he began to walk toward the ship.

  There was a dazed expression on Lela’s face. She straightened slowly, settled herself behind the long spitgun and aimed it. Her face seemed bloodless and she sat very still.

  Twice she seemed in the act of pressing the activator of that remarkable weapon. Each time she shuddered and closed her eyes. "I can’t,” she whispered at last. "I can’t!”

  The Shadow was less than fifty feet away. In a frantic will to action Cargill pulled the girl out of the chair, settled into it and grabbed the gun. A sheet of flame reared up a dozen feet in front of the Shadow.

  The Shadow paid no attention. He came on. Once more Cargill fired. The flame blazed through the Shadow. A score of feet behind him grass and shrubbery burned with a white intensity. Twice more Cargill fired directly into the Shadow-shape—and each time it was as if there was nothing there, no resistance, no substance. And the Shadow-shape came closer.

  Cargill ceased firing. He was trembling. There was a thought in his mind —a new tremendous thought. If the Shadow-shape were insubstantial, if potent, palpable energy meant nothing to it, then what about steel walls.

  The next instant he had his answer. There was a blur of movement near the door, a swelling darkness. Lela screamed.

  And then the Shadow was in the room.

  CHAPTER IX The Moment for Action

  THIS time, there was no sense of transition. One instant he was in the floater with Lela and the Shadow Grannis. The next moment he was sitting in a chair, trying to blink away a blur over his vision. It cleared after several seconds and he looked around him.

  He saw that he was in a chair at one end of a tastefully furnished living room. On one wall was a clock that said “May 6, 9:24 P.M.” To his left was an open door through which he could see the edge of a bed.

  The wall directly across from him was made of transparent glass and beyond it, at the far end of another room, he could see a girl sitting in a chair that seemed to be a replica of his own. Just for a moment, Cargill had the feeling that all this was strange and then he recognized the girl. He jerked erect with amazement.

  It was the young woman who had tried to pretend that she was Marie Chanette.

  It was the room where he had first arrived in the 24th century.

  His mind wrenched with a terrible understanding. He was hack to the evening of his original arrival.

  The astounding thing was that he had no doubt about it. The knowledge grew out of a score of separate incidents that drew together inside him now to form the whole picture. This was about the time and exactly the scene at which and on which he had arrived from the dream ROOM from 1946.

  It took time to verify that. Trembling, he wrote a note to the girl and held it up against the glass. The note read, How long have you been here?

  In answer, she wrote, About three hours.

  Cargill nodded in an intensity of understanding. She could be lying, of course. She was unquestionably on a different footing with these people than himself and one of the problems he had to solve was—where had she been during the past few months?

  That could wait. Distracted, he realized his limited possibilities for verifying the details. There was no way that he could prove or disprove any of her statements. The feeling he had, that Grannis was not satisfied with events as they had occurred and that the entire scene of his arrival was to be done over again, had come out of his own mind.

  He wrote two more notes, repeating the questions he had asked the first time—months ago—and then, in a haze of excitement, he retreated to a chair. Slowly, sitting there, he grew more sober.

  Something of the fantastic nature of what had happened penetrated. He wondered almost blankly—what about Lela? What had happened to her? Or rather what would happen to her? Staggered, he thought about some of the possible paradoxes.

  The confusion that started then rocketed him out of his chair and sent him on a frantic exploration of the apartment. It was all as he remembered it and what was particularly important was that the bed looked as if he had previously slept on it.

  He remembered the chair that he had smashed and raced from the bedroom back to the living-room to examine it. He found it crumpled in a corner where he had tossed it. His picture of the limits of the paradox grew sharper. This was the room after Ann Reece had rescued him—not very long after, however.

  Cargill began to sag. The pressure that was working on him was different from anything he had ever experienced. Different even from the first minutes of his first arrival. There was a shattering implication here.

  If these people didn’t like what had happened in any time period they could alter it. In one directed time-reversal they could cancel what had displeased them and the next time, with pre-knowledge, could force it to the pattern they desired.

  There was a possibility here that after what he had done in trying to organize a Planiac rebellion Grannis wanted the Shadows to carry through with their original purpose. That would be the simplest way of nullifying the past.

  His captors, knowing nothing of his months with the floater folk, could now proceed to kill him without ever suspecting that Grannis had plotted against them.

  Cargill decided grimly, “I’ll fix that. The moment they get in touch with me I'll tell them the whole story.”

  He was planning his exact words when a voice said from behind him, “Morton Cargill, it is my duty to prepare you for death."

  The moment for action—and counteraction—had come.

  Cargill climbed to his feet. Fighting his anxiety and speaking clearly he launched into his account. He had time for half a dozen sentences and then the voice interrupted him, not deliberately, not with any intent to break into what he was saying.

  The interruption showed no awareness that he had said anything. Whoever was talking had not heard his words.

  The voice said, “Events are supremely convincing. I shall now describe to you the complex problem with which you presented us when Marie Chanette was killed in the Twentieth Century.” Cargill couldn’t help it. He had to cut in. He said loudly, "Just a minute. You’ve explained this to me before.”

  "Violence,” the voice said, “affects not just one individual but future generations as
well.”

  Cargill shouted, "Listen to me. There’s a plot—”

  "It’s like a stone,” said the voice, "that is flung furiously into a limitless sea. The ripples go on forever and wash up many a strange flotsam on shores remote beyond imagination.”

  Cargill trembled with anger. “You stupid idiots!” he yelled, "Surely you haven’t put me in here without any chance of telling you what’s happened.” But his very anger measured the extent of his own belief that surely they had indeed.

  Inexorably the voice continued. And for the first time Cargill realized that it was giving him information different from that of—months ago.

  "Listen to the case,” it said, "of Marie Chanette.”

  For better or worse he listened. His muscles tensed and his mind jumped with impatience but he listened. Gradually then, in spite of his own purposes, he grew calmer and began to feel fascinated.

  Much indeed had happened as the result of the death of Marie Chanette. She died in a car accident and in pain. The pain ended with her death but that was not the end.

  There was no normal end.

  Marie Chanette was survived by a daughter who, at the time of her mother’s decease, was three years and two months of age, and by a husband from whom she was not yet officially divorced. The fight for the possession of the child had been bitter and on the death of her mother little Julia Marie reverted automatically to the care of her father, an insurance salesman.

  At first he kept her in a nursery school and had a neighboring woman tend her after the school bus brought her home. At first he spent occasional evenings with her. But he was a hard worker, and evening calls on prospects were part of his routine.

  The enforced habit of not having much to do with her made it easy to forget all about her on evenings when it was just a matter of going out with the gang for a good time.

  He told himself that she was really getting a better upbringing than if her mother had been alive and that he was "paying plenty” for her care. When she asked why she didn’t have a mummy like the other kids he decided in her own interests (so he informed himself) to tell her his distorted version of the truth.

  And he discovered that she already knew it. Some of the other kids had heard garbled stories and had shrieked the words at her. They were locked up tightly inside her heart.

  She grew up unstable, blotchy-faced, easily upset, a bad-tempered, wilful child—"just like your mother, blast you!” Chanette shouted at her when he was drunk.

  She never got over the tensions of her childhood, though she turned out to be a good-looking girl and had a brief exciting spring between the ages of 21 end 25. She married in 1965 a young man named Thompson, who was not good enough for her.

  She had too great an inferiority complex to aspire to anything higher. In 1974, she gave him a boy child, a girl, in 1976 and died in 1980, ostensibly from a major hysterectomy but actually from an ultimate case of overwrought nerves.

  Thompson drifted along for a while at his job but now that the intense driving frightening personality of his wife was no longer pushing him he was quick to retreat from responsibility. He lacked the capacity to appreciate the benefits he had accumulated in fifteen years of service with the Atomotor Corporation.

  Just as they were about to promote him to the kind of field work which the firm’s “Constitutional” psychologist had recommended for him he traded his atobout for a floater, gave up his job, sold his house—and became a Planiac.

  They called them that in those lazy glorious days just before the turn of the twenty-first century. They were floaters, people who had no home but a house in the sky. All day long they floated through the air anywhere from a few thousand feet to a few miles up.

  At night they would come down beside a graceful stream and cast for fish. Or they would float down onto the ocean and return to land with a catch which some cannery would be glad to buy.

  They followed the crops. They were the new race of fruit pickers, harvesters and casual laborers. They remained a day, a week, but seldom a month. They only wanted a stake, enough money to live until tomorrow.

  In 2002 A.D. it was estimated that nineteen million people in the United States had become floaters or Planiacs. The stay-at-home majority was shocked and economists predicted disaster for the land unless something was done to bring the skyriding population back to earth.

  When a hard-pressed Congress in 2004 tried to pass a law restricting skyriding to vacations only it was too late. The voting power of the Planiacs frightened the house majority, and thereafter the floaters—who had themselves received a big scare—were a political force to be reckoned with.

  The bitter feeling between the floaters and the grounders, already intense, grew sharper and deadlier with the passing years. Everyone took Bides. Some who had been grounders bought floaters and joined the restless throngs in the sky.

  Others, vaguely recognizing the danger and moved by some kind of moral feeling, descended from the sky. Among the latter was an oldster named William Thompson, his grown-up son, Pinkey, and his daughter, Christina.

  Johnny “Pinkey” Thompson never married and so he was merely an environment, a ne’er-do-well anthropological “climate,” an irritant on the slime of time. He existed, therefore he influenced those with whom he came in contact.

  Whatever he took into his bloodstream before severing bodily connection with his mother manifested indirectly. Many years were to pass before psychologists proved that the tensions of men too could affect the child. But Pinkey had no child.

  When Christina Thompson, his sister, came out of the blue sky her grandmother, Marie Chanette, had been dead sixty-one years. The emotional ripples of her death had therefore already reached into another century.

  No one knows definitely what does or does not affect and influence a child. Her mother’s tense body had precipitated Christina into life in the eighth month of her pregnancy. The seventh month would have been better. During the eighth month certain growths occur in a child which should not be disturbed.

  The process was disturbed in Christina.

  She was a quiet intense little girl, given to sudden, unexpected tears and was quite a nuisance to her father and brother when she was younger. She knew, in a casual fashion, about the way her grandmother had died.

  What she did not know was that the new psychology had already established that people could be affected by events in the remote past of the continuous bloodstream which had flowed from mother through daughter since life first channeled the salt sea into a flesh body.

  Christina reluctantly attached herself to a job and, when she was twenty-eight, married the son of a former Planiac. The three children that arrived in quick succession were demoralized by the endless plans of their restless poverty-stricken parents to save so they could buy a floater, so that they could forever abandon the hardships of ground life.

  Two of the children dreamed with their parents but the second child, a girl, reacted violently against what she came to consider their shiftless attitude. Their very talk made her uneasy and insecure.

  Her opinions being discovered she became unpopular until she learned to show false enthusiasm for the venture. She ran away when she was eighteen on the eve of the first trip in the hard-earned floater.

  She had several jobs, then at twenty-one she became a clerk in a small airtransport company. Small! It barely paid a living wage to the father and son who owned it, in addition to paying her salary.

  When she married Garry Lane, the son, at twenty-two, it looked like a very poor match, even to her desperate eyes. But it was a love match and, surprisingly, the business prospered.

  Well, not exactly surprisingly—the son had one of those marvelous personalities. When he made a contact it stuck. Business flew their way and soon they lived in a grand house in the Hollywood Hills.

  They had two children, Betty and Jack. And what saddened the parents was that both children were neurotics.

  They hired specially trained nurses. That hel
ped but not as much as it should have.

  At twenty-four Betty Lane, having been advised that her instability was not rooted in her own childhood, was directed by her personal psychologist to go to the Inter-Time Society for Psychological Adjustment.

  She went. An investigation was made and it was decided that the death of Marie Chanette was responsible.

  “—and that,” said the voice from the air in front of Cargill, “explains why you are here in this therapy room. Tomorrow morning it will be necessary to kill you in order that the effects of Marie Chanette’s violent death can be nullified. That is all.”

  There was silence and it was evident that the speaker had withdrawn.

  For an hour Cargill paced the room like a caged animal, his temper steadily gathering strength. But finally his thoughts narrowed back to reality.

  He had become dangerous to Grannie and so now he was to be killed. Incredibly the Shadows, despite their vaunted superiority, were going to be destroyed by the schemes of one of their number.

  It served them right, Cargill told himself in fury. Imagine setting up a situation whereby their victims couldn’t even talk to them—the silly, stupid fools!

  In abrupt rebellion against his fate, he explored the apartment for some means of escape, first the living room, and then—

  As he entered the bedroom, Ann Reece was just getting up from the floor. She saw him, and put a finger to her lips. “Ssssshh!” she said.

  Cargill blinked at her with eyes that watered with relief. He could have rushed over and hugged her. He had to restrain himself from racing over to the elongated tube-like instrument which had brought her, grabbing at it and shouting, “Let’s get out of here!” He restrained himself because it was up to her to show if she remembered a previous rescue.

  She said, “This time let’s not waste a moment. It’s bad enough having to come twice.”