Then a whipping metal tentacle struck me savagely.

  Anomaly in Time

  Bruised and dazed, I seized that flailing tentacle. After one stunned instant, I knew what it was—a loose cable from the broken full-G wheel. Though half the ring had

  been blown away by that exploding micro-missile, wreckage of the rest still spun around the ice asteroid.

  The cable twisted away, slipping in my gloves. I held on grimly, for I clung to life itself. Desperately, I kept my grip until my un-guided flight was checked. Laboriously then, fighting the centrifugal force that was like inverted gravity, I started climbing toward the axle of the broken wheel.

  That took a long time.

  Though I had been able to stop that first terrifying slide not far beyond the half-G point, the suit itself, even with empty mass-tanks, was still as heavy as my body. The gloves gave me only a precarious grip on the whirling cable. I climbed and had to rest, climbed and had to rest.

  For all my years in space, I could not escape a terrifying illusion. The asteroid seemed suspended overhead, a shadowy starlit bulk. The whirling cable seemed to hang straight down into an insane black pit. The stars themselves seemed to spin crazily around and around and around me, until I had to fight a giddy nausea.

  Northward, the anomaly was near one stationary pole of that whirling universe. The black funnel of the guarded gateway was larger every time I looked, the yellow neck of the trapped asteroid always brighter in its bottomless throat.

  Somewhere southward, Ken Star was maneuvering the capsule under cover of the ice asteroid. Once or twice I saw the pale blue jet receding into starry distance. For a time I lost it. Then I saw it coming back—a faint blue flare with the capsule itself a tiny black point at its heart.

  It passed while I clung to that slippery cable. The blue flare winked out. A shadow flickered across the whirling stars, just below me. It went on, rockets dead, invisible.

  Twisting anxiously on the cable, I looked after it into the anomaly. Dizzy and shivering, I watched the rim of the funnel for the flash of a weapon. I waited for the small new star that would be the capsule, sterilized.

  The dark universe kept whirling around me. The funnel kept growing. The point of yellow-white light in its throat was suddenly gone as that remote asteroid went through, into Nowhere.

  Nothing else happened.

  Muscles knotted and quivering, I climbed up through a cruel agony of sick exhaustion. Though my strength was failing, that savage force decreased as I drew toward the axis of rotation. Without thrusters, I had to make a reckless leap from that broken wheel to the nearly stationary hub that held the locks.

  I caught the edge of the collapsed plastic shaft that lay across the lock and hauled myself along it until at last I could drag myself through the fouled valve and fall inside the lock.

  For a time I simply lay there, trembling with exhaustion, until I found strength and purpose to cycle myself through the man-lock and clamber out of the suit and look for Lilith. She was gone from the lock deck. Calling her name, I got no answer.

  A dreadful stillness hung inside the ruined station. Listening desperately, I heard only the thudding blood in my own ears. Cold alarm clutched at me. Snatching a hand-jet, I soared wildly around the hub, hoarsely shouting her name.

  Still she didn’t answer, but a muffled sob drew me to the deck of the next lock, the one from which the mutineers had fled. I found her there, lying face down on a pile of space gear which the fugitives had left abandoned on the deck.

  “Lilith!”

  Whimpering and quivering, she didn’t seem to hear. But I saw a darting, furtive movement, caught a flash of black and red and platinum. For one dazed instant I thought she was trying her weapon on me. Then dreadful understanding stunned me.

  “Lilith—don’t!”

  Scrambling for traction in the nearly null gravity of the slowly turning hub, I launched myself across the deck. I came down sprawling on her, caught her arm, twisted her hand away from her teeth.

  Fighting back with tigerish fury, she nearly won. I was still reeling from my ordeal in space, and her Legion teachers had trained her well. Feinting, kicking, jabbing with a deadly expertness, she twisted her hand free. She got it nearly back to her lips. To stop her mouth, I kissed her.

  “Lars?”

  She spoke my name with an unbelieving gasp. Suddenly she was limp, sobbing in my arms. I snatched her hand again, stripped off the poison ring. Her teeth had not reached that ugly skull. Its red wink mocked me, deadly still.

  “Lilith—” Panting for breath and strength and courage, I fought a wild impulse to throw the ring down the air duct. “It’s just me! And the time hasn’t come to—”

  I couldn’t say it.

  “You were gone so long!” Wide and glazed and dark, her bronze eyes stared at me. “I thought you’d been lost in space. When I heard something moving, I was afraid— afraid it was an invader—come to capture me—”

  She clung to me, shuddering and sobbing.

  “Lars! Lars! I’m so terribly glad it’s you!”

  I kissed her again, this time not to stop her mouth.

  After a while she laughed softly in my arms.

  “Captain Ulnar, your first duty is the security of AKKA.” Her breathless voice mocked Ken Star’s brusque command. “I like the way you’re attending to it. You’ve saved my life—and made me human again!”

  I held her alive and wonderful in my arms.

  “Never—destroy yourself!” The words even were so painful that I could scarcely whisper them. “The invaders will be taking care of that,” I told her bleakly. “Too

  soon now—unless Ken Star and Giles do better than I expect.”

  “Don’t speak of that!” she breathed. “Let’s forget!”

  We tried to forget. For a little time, we almost did forget. But the stillness of the station was a monstrous voice of warning, and our thudding hearts were tramping feet of terror. Imperative dread drove us back to the laser dome.

  We were deep in the anomaly. That black funnel had covered half the northward stars. With the electron telescope I searched its long rim for the invading machines hanging there. I found nothing. They were nearer now, I knew, but we had no light to see them by. When they sterilized our asteroid, I thought bleakly, its glow would make them visible again, but not to us.

  “Lars—it’s the shot!”

  Crouching back against me in the chill red gloom of that null-G space, Lilith pointed at the dome. Beyond it, against that vast and featureless pit of blackness, I saw a sudden pale blue flare.

  “It’s the sterilizing shot!”

  “I don’t—don’t think so.” An unbelieving relief took away my voice. “I think it’s the retro-rockets of that capsule.”

  “Giles and Ken?” She hung peering at me, a pink and adorable ghost in that lifeless night. “Can they really be coming back?” She caught a sobbing breath. “Can you call them? Find out what they’ve found?”

  “I’m afraid to risk a call,” I said. “Any signal might draw another shot. But it is the capsule—in braking flight toward the station hub.”

  We were waiting in the hub when the capsule nudged its way back into the lock. The drive motor for the hull valve was still dead, but I stood ready to cycle through the man-lock and seal the valve by hand.

  Air roared into the chamber. Shucking off the space suit, I stumbled around the capsule to help with the hatch. It stuck at first, groaned open rustily. A man’s head thrust out—shrunken, white-bearded, old. Sunken eyes peered out at me, warily alert.

  “Lars Ulnar?” Ken Star’s voice was rasping at me, queerly thin, queerly aged, queerly unbelieving. “You are still waiting here?”

  “Of course we are.” I caught his parchment hand. “Let me help you, sir.”

  Queerly dwindled, queerly bent, he let me help him through the hatch. Old Habibula followed. Even he was thinner, though his skin still looked smooth and pink as Lilith’s. His pebble-colored eyes rolled wildly at her and me.

  “Lars!” His voice was a wheezy, unbelieving croak. “Lil! We’re mortal glad to find you here—and still alive! When we saw the station not repaired we thought it must have been abandoned.”

  Squinting strangely at us, he shook his hairless head.

  “Did they maroon you here?” he gasped. “Alone in this wicked wreck? Or did the

  relief ship never come? Have you been trapped out here all this mortal time?”

  Leaning on Lilith’s arm, as if he needed support even here where gravity was nearly null, Ken Star stood peering with those bright, sunken eyes at her and me.

  “How long—” His old voice quavered and broke. “By your tune, how long have we been away?”

  “Two hours.” I studied my watch. “Perhaps a little longer—”

  “Two mortal hours!” old Habibula bleated unbelievingly. “You’re joking with us— when we’ve suffered too much and toiled too long and endured too many mortal disasters to be met with silly jokes.”

  Flushed with indignation, he sobbed for his breath.

  “We’ve just got back from beyond the anomaly. We’ve fought through perils that would freeze the precious brain in your skull. We’ve existed for desperate years on synthetic gruel and iron determination. We’ve set our precious wits against the grimmest riddles of a foreign universe.”

  He wheezed again, as if gasping for life itself.

  “And now you greet us with a silly joke!”

  “I don’t understand—but it’s no joke, Giles.” I looked from him to the bent old man who had been Ken Star. “We’ve been watching the time, because we have so little left. The station is still falling into the anomaly. I don’t think we have an hour left.”

  The old man nodded with a birdlike alertness. The bandage was gone that Ken Star had worn, but I saw the thin blue line of a zig-zag scar across his yellow parchment forehead—an old scar, healed long ago.

  “Time is different where we’ve been,” he said. “I hadn’t realized just how different— though my theory does explain it. With the shift in space-time coordinates, instants here can be ages there. Most of the time we had no better clocks than our own bodies, but since we left here we have experienced months of time—”

  “Mortal years!” old Habibula wailed. “So long I can’t recall the precious taste of caviar or wine!”

  “If you got through the anomaly—” Stark urgency caught my voice. “Did you find a defense? Did you find any way to stop the invaders?”

  “We learned tremendous things!” The old man nodded solemnly. “What we learned points a way to safety—possibly even for us. But I’d expected that dark gateway to be closed long ago.”

  Dread shadowed his haggard eyes.

  “So long as it is open, we’re in desperate danger!” He caught my arm with a quick yellow claw. “Let’s get to the control center—fast. I want another look—if there is time! I’m afraid that we have been betrayed by that anomaly in time!”

  ‘The Mother of Machines!’

  We retreated to the control drum, shielded in the core of the ice asteroid. I helped Star from the cable stage into the slowly spinning rim—and stopped with a gasp of dismay when I saw the projected electronic chart on the round south wall.

  That monstrous creature had devoured nearly all the chart. Its ragged purple legs reached down to us and up to the curve of the drum overhead. The bright green circle was deep inside its swollen belly.

  “It looks—dreadful!” Lilith’s tense fingers clutched my arm. “What does it mean?”

  “The computer integrates our instrument readings into that picture of the anomaly,” I told her. “The web’s the magnetic field. The legs are gravitic vortices—like the one that caught us. The belly is the region where the anomalous effects are so intense we get no readings. That’s where the invaders have opened their gateway—”

  “Captain,” Ken Star broke in sharply, “let’s try the telescope. Our flight was blind— it’s more luck than astrogation that got us back to Nowhere Near. I’d like to see what’s going on behind us.”

  “We can try,” I said. “But our radar and laser gear are dead now, and the telescope requires a source of light—”

  “Try it.” Urgency crackled in his thin old voice. “I think there’ll be light.”

  One soaring bound carried me across the drum to the console that controlled the telescope. We all stood watching the north wall. The huge round screen was suddenly fringed with wavering points of light—the dimmed and shifting images of stars beyond the anomaly. All the center remained black, empty, ominous.

  “There’s the funnel, sir,” I told Ken Star. “Without a light, we can’t pick up the machines.”

  “Wait!” Ken Star was breathless with expectance. “There’ll be light.”

  Light came. A thin pale feather floated from the rim of the funnel, flowed toward its center. Another streaked to meet it. Slow meteors grew, converging there.

  “Debris their micro-missile blasted off this asteroid,” Star said. “On the flight here we came through the cloud. It should give us light enough to locate those machines.”

  For a moment I stood numb. My imagination was too vivid. Those converging points and plumes were the stuff of our own asteroid, falling ahead of us into that unimaginable chasm. We were too close behind.

  “Captain!” Star raised his voice. “Before the light is gone—”

  Though my fingers were stiff and clumsy at the console, I found the greenish image of the invader stationed north of the anomaly. It was moving, drifting southward. As the light increased, we picked up three other faint greenish shadows, the other invaders, all converging in that black abyss.

  “That object!” Star’s voice lifted sharply. “Coming to meet them —can you get a better image?”

  “Not without a better light.” With the low power we had to use in that poor light, those enormous fighting machines were tiny greenish flecks. At first I could see nothing else. Then I made out

  a vague blur emerging from the dark ahead of them. In the glow of a new plume of fire, it was suddenly clear. I heard Lilith gasp. “A machine?” she breathed. “A ship!” “The mother of all machines!” old Habibula croaked from the doorway. “It has

  followed us back from that foreign universe!” The thing was made of seven unequal spheres, partly fused together. Roughly spindle-shaped, thick at the center, it tapered toward both pointed ends. Three curved rods or

  tubes made a tight cage that bound the spheres. I shivered with awe at its strangeness— and its enormous size. “It must be big!” Dazed, I was trying to imagine just how big it must be. If those gray-green motes

  flying to meet it were machines a hundred times the size of a Legion cruiser, I thought it must be another hundred times larger. “Mortal big!” croaked old Habibula. “It’s the monstrous mother ship!” Unbelievingly, I turned to Ken Star.

  “Is it really—a ship?” “Space fort might be a better term,” Star said. “It’s a good ten miles along those— let’s call ‘em decks—from nose to tail. The middle globe must be two miles through—and it’s filled with tilings you can’t imagine.”

  “Do you mean—?” He nodded a brisk answer to that half-spoken question. “We were aboard.” He tugged at his neat white beard. “Long enough at least for this

  to grow.” “Years!” puffed old Habibula. “Mortal years of fear and famine!” He had left us on the way from the lock to the drum, and now I saw that he had

  slipped away to raid his private hoard. His tattered pockets bulged, and he clutched an

  open bottle of the rare wine of Earth in each baby-hand. “What does it mean?” Staring at the growing image of that enormous, alien spindle-shape, I felt a chill of puzzled dread. Nothing about it told me anything. I swung blankly back to Ken Star. “What did you discover?”

  “Wait, Captain.” He lifted a thin yellow claw. “I want to see what it does.” Moving with an old spaceman’s cautious rhythm, Habibula waddled across the curve of the drum to a table. Carefully, he planted the bottles of wine. From his bulging

  pockets he unloaded clinking tins of caviar. The rest of us stood watching the green electronic shadow of that titanic thing.

  We saw a port open in that largest central globe—a faint dark dot. We saw the four drifting sparks converge and wheel outside it. We saw them enter and vanish one by one. We saw the dot disappear.

  “That valve is fifteen hundred feet across,” Star said. “Among the instruments around it is a tube which I suppose is a wave-guide for signals from an outside antenna. That’s the entrance Giles found for us.”

  A new respect drew my eyes to old Habibula. He had opened a can of caviar. Using a small pocket tool that combined opener and spoon, he was stuffing the little black eggs into his mouth. He belched.

  “A desperate adventure!” His rust-colored eyes blinked across the table. “I’ve risked my precious life ten thousand times in faithful service to the Legion. But I’ve never endured such a dreadful time as this!”

  “Giles does possess special skills,” Star agreed briskly. “Without them, we should certainly have failed.”

  “But never did my genius face such a fearful trial!” old Habibula moaned. “You know my hard-earned arts have helped me solve some frightful problems for mankind. I entered the black city of the evil Medusae! I unlocked the inner world of the monstrous Cometeers! I solved the deadly riddle of the Basilisk! But never was a time so mortal black as this!”

  He paused to gulp from a tilted bottle.

  “Beyond the anomaly, we came into a fearful universe you’d never imagine. A black and dreadful world where human life has no right to be. But for my precious genius, we should both have died there.”

  “Even with all Giles’ peculiar aptitudes, we very nearly did.”

  Ken Star stood watching the shadowy image of that appalling machine. When I began asking, a little wildly, what they had found beyond the anomaly, his withered hand lifted impatiently to cut me off.

  “We’ve been gone too long,” he muttered rustily. “I’m too tired— and too much has happened. When we found the station here, I was hoping we were safe. But now, since we’ve run into an anomaly in time, I’m afraid we’ve no leisure for any connected narrative.”

 

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