CITADEL OF THE STAR LORDS
By Edmond Hamilton
Out of the dark vastness of the void came a
conquering horde, incredible and invincible,
with Earth's only weapon--a man from the past!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
October 1956
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
As he gunned his plane northward through the night, Price thought of
the roller-coaster when he'd been a kid, of how you went faster and
faster until you hit the big plunge.
Well, he was on the big plunge now. And what would end this
roller-coaster ride--prison, or escape, or a crash? It had to be one
of those.
_He was to remember that, later. He was to think later that it was well
he didn't dream the fantastic fate he was really racing toward...._
He looked down, and there was only blackness. The deserts of California
and Nevada are dark and wide, and he was keeping well away from the
airways beacons and the main highways.
He kept the Beechcraft as high as he could. He was flying without
lights, but with what they already had against him, that minor
infraction wasn't important. He kept looking back, expecting every
minute to see the red-and-green winglights of Border Patrol planes
coming up on his tail.
If he was lucky, if he slipped them long enough, if he crossed north
without being sighted by the passenger planes that shuttled between Las
Vegas and Los Angeles, he might just make it to Bill Willerman's and
get the Beechcraft under cover. If--if--if--
There was another if, Price thought bitterly. If he'd had any brains,
he wouldn't be in this spot at all.
He turned on the radio. He flipped the dial around, getting loud music
from a Vegas hotel, then a political speech, then more music--and then
a news broadcast. As he'd expected, he was at the top of the news.
"--so that even while Arnolfo Ruiz, firebrand revolutionary exile,
is under arrest by Mexican police, United States authorities are
conducting an intensive air-dragnet search for the American pilot who
smuggled Ruiz across the border. That unknown pilot is known to have
returned across the border an hour ago, and police of three states have
been alerted.
"The AEC announces that its next test will be that of an experimental
small new H-bomb whose effects will be studied for--"
Price savagely cut the radio. He damned the announcer, and Ruiz, and
himself. Most of all, himself.
He'd acted like a halfwit. Because a smooth talker had given him
a phony story about a secret business trip, he had smuggled the
most dangerous trouble-maker in the hemisphere down into a friendly
republic. Who would believe he hadn't known? He _had_ done it, and
pressure from Washington would make sure that he got full pay for his
folly.
He might as well look the truth in the face. If it hadn't been this,
it would have been something else. He'd been playing the fool for
years, ever since Korea. Other fliers had come home from there and
taken up their jobs again, but a job had been too dull for him; he'd
drifted along with the fast-buck fly-boys out for fun and excitement,
hauling hunting and fishing parties, spending the profits in bordertown
bars, going broke and starting over again--and now finally this. His
roller-coaster ride was about over.
It would be over for good if he didn't reach Willerman's ranch before
daylight. Bill would hide the plane for him. He'd saved Bill's neck a
couple of times in the old days, and he could depend on him. But he had
to reach him, first.
He saw the glow in the sky that came from the lights of Las Vegas, and
he kept warily wide of it. He looked back again. No Patrol planes yet.
As he rushed on, Price began to feel that he was going to make it.
Then, suddenly and disastrously, everything happened at once.
He saw lights on the ground ahead--an oddly scattered pattern of lights
too thin to be a town, too wide-spread to be a ranch.
At the same moment, two fast jets screamed down from the upper darkness
and nearly tore his wings off. They curved around for another pass at
him.
"Air Force planes!" thought Price. "Hell, that tears it--"
It seemed crazy that the government was _that_ hot to catch him. But
the jets were making another lightning pass to him, trying to scare
him, to force him down.
He had less than a chance in a million to lose them, and he knew it.
But he was going to be a long time in jail, and he might as well give
them a run for it. Just possibly, the slower Beechcraft could get away
in the dark the next time they overshot him.
He gunned the plane wide open, rushing high over the scattered lights.
And then, incredibly, he was free of his pursuers. He looked over his
shoulder and saw them drawing back.
It didn't make sense. Why would they suddenly draw back? Anyway, with
those jets off his tail, he still had a chance.
Price looked down. Among the lights down there he saw lights on a queer
steel tower. He'd seen pictures of a tower like that somewhere. It
wasn't an oil-rig, but something he couldn't remember.
And then, suddenly, he remembered, and a terrible coldness choked him
and his flesh flinched as he saw a door into nightmare opening.
That tower, and the announcement of a new H-bomb test, and the distance
he was from Vegas, and the way those frantic jets had drawn back....
"Oh, no," said Price. "Oh, no, oh no, oh no--"
He was still saying it when the bomb went off and the universe cracked
wide open under his racing plane.
CHAPTER II
The cataclysm that hit Price was without light or sound. That, when he
thought of it later, was the most awful feature of it.
He felt a shock, but not the shock of ultimate annihilation he
expected. This was a shuddering impact as of the plane, himself,
hitting some barrier and forcing through, a rending, tearing, dizzying
thing that was like no sensation he had ever experienced.
He yelled, naked terror forcing the air from his lungs. His weight
flung against the straps, and he knew from that that the plane was in
a spin. Mechanically, his hands reached to the controls. He levelled
off....
_But he wasn't dead. He was alive, undestroyed, and how could that be
if the raving energies of a hydrogen bomb had been unloosed beneath
him?_
Price's mind was a mad turmoil. What had happened?
He had blundered right over the bomb test-area, right over the
bomb-tower. And the jets guarding the area had tried to stop him.
Probably, if his radio hadn't been off, he would have heard them
screaming frantic warnings to him.
But had the bomb really gone off? If it had, he would surely have been
instantly annihilated.
He hadn't been. He was alive. The plane was ticking along through the
night. The instruments functioned.
But _something_ terrific had happened. That ghastly, wrenching shock
that had seemed to outrage the very atoms of his body--his flesh still
crawled with the memory of it. Something had happened. But what?
Price couldn't think. The mind just could not grapple with a thing like
this. He sat, mechanically touching the controls, and the Beechcraft
roared on and on.
Gradually, his mind came alive. He shakily swung the plane around. He
was going back to Las Vegas. Right now, arrest and prison looked good
to him compared to what had happened, or nearly happened.
If he hadn't been so tensely trying to escape, he thought, he would
have remembered about the bomb-tests coming up. There had been
newspaper stories. Guarded stories about a radical physical effect
detected during explosions of the new-type H-bombs, and mention of
elaborate preparations being made to study these unusual effects.
Price's thoughts leaped suddenly. He recalled a scientist's statement
that the center of explosion of the new-type bomb might be like the
eye of a hurricane, a focus of inconceivable forces but affected in a
radically different way by those forces.
_Had_ the bomb gone off under him, then? Had his plane and himself,
at the "eye" of the tremendous explosion, been hurled somehow through
spatial barriers into safety before the light and sound and destruction
could even reach him?
It seemed an insane speculation. Yet everything about this was insane.
He would be himself, if he didn't get down to Earth soon.
He could not see the glow of Las Vegas anywhere in the night. He cut
his radio in and spoke hoarsely into it.
"Beechcraft 4556 calling Las Vegas Airport! Come in, Las Vegas!"
There was no answer. The radio seemed operative--but when he turned the
receiver dials, not a sound came out.
"Knocked out," Price muttered. "And no wonder, if--"
He couldn't finish the thought, it was too soul-shaking a thing to
speculate on, the thing that might have happened to him.
He curved the plane around, looking for highway lights, for an airways
beacon, anything.
Nothing. Nothing but the darkness and the stars.
* * * * *
A little frantically, he swung the plane around and started eastward
again. He must have missed Las Vegas. But if he kept going east, he'd
surely cut the main highways. There were always lots of cars on them at
night, in the summer.
He flew on and on. And the darkness continued. No lights at all, not
even the glimmer from a lonely ranch.
Nothing.
He would have landed, gladly now, but he did not know where he was or
what was under him. The Beechcraft was equipped with extra fuel tanks
for long flights away from any source of supply, and they had been full
when he started. He could fly a long time yet.
He flew.
After a while he began to think that there was only one explanation. He
was dead, and flying in limbo.
And limbo, it seemed, went on forever.
Finally, after many hours there began to be a light in the blackness
ahead of him, and his heart leaped up, thinking that at last he had
raised the glow of a big town. But it was only the dawn. He watched it
creep cold and gray across the world, and now he understood that he was
alive. But he was not cheered. Now he could see what was underneath him.
Forest. Rolling like a dark green sea from north to south, from east
to west. He had left the desert far behind. He figured that he was
over Missouri now, and there should have been towns, villages, farms,
cultivated fields.
There was forest.
The light turned rosy, then golden. The sun sprang up and it was day.
Far ahead the Mississippi gleamed. Price sent the Beechcraft at full
throttle, toward St. Louis. He could not see any smoke from the great
complex of city and industry that sprawled there over both banks of the
river, and he could not see any bridges. But St. Louis had to be there.
It was. But it had changed since he saw it last. The high buildings
were brought low, and the low buildings were mounds, shells covered
with brush and fox-grape, and trees grew in the public streets and
through the broken windows. The river, vast and placid, was empty
except for a floating log. Obstructions along the shores might once
have been docks, but were so no longer. And there was a great stillness.
For one wild moment Price thought, _The bomb did it last night, the
new-type bomb with energies they didn't even dream about._ Then he
realized that that was hardly possible. You can destroy a city with an
H-bomb in a matter of seconds, but you can't grow an oak tree sixty
feet high in the rubble of the City Hall in much under a century.
Time had passed since last night.
This was too much to take in all at once. Price didn't even try. He
looked for a place to land, but there wasn't any, so he kept on flying,
eastward across the river.
Time had passed, and he had passed with it. Slowly it began to come
to Price, the dreadful and incredible truth of what had happened. The
wrenching, tearing shock he had felt in the eye of the blast was not
physical but temporal. The uncomprehended powers of the bomb had been
mightier than anyone had guessed. They warped the ordered fabric of the
space-time continuum itself, and acting on the matter of himself and
his plane at the "eye" of the explosion, had warped them too--into the
future.
The Beechcraft went droning through the empty sky. Price looked down
on desolation, green and peaceful and as unproductive as it had been
before men ever came with axe and plow to tame it.
How far in the future?
He did not know.
Were there still men, surviving somewhere in this wilderness? Or had
humanity destroyed itself in a final act of atomic madness? Were all
the cities dead and dust?
He did not know that either.
He only knew that he was too numb and exhausted to go much farther. He
had to have water and food and sleep. He had to have a place to land.
* * * * *
He found it well beyond the river, a natural prairie in the midst of
trees. He tried to gauge the way the wind was blowing by the ripple of
the grass, and then he circled in a long curve to the north to head
it. As he did so he thought he saw an iron glinting to the northeast,
something very vast and strange as of the sun reflecting from a face of
metal mountain-high and wide. Then he dropped low over the tree-tops,
and whatever the glinting was he could not see it any more.
The Beechcraft bumped and bounded to a stop. Price sat for a moment
watching his hands shake on the controls, and then some last measure
of caution made him taxi the plane back, to the extreme edge of the
prairie and nose it into the wind, ready to take off again with no
delay.
He had a sporting rifle and revolver in the plane. He buckled on the
revolver, stuffed his pockets full of cartridges for the rifle, and
climbed down to the ground. He stood for several minutes in the shelter
of the plane's wing, looking around, but he could not see any signs of
life except a pair of crows flapping over his head with rusty cawing.
It was late summer, and the wind was dry and hot. He began to walk
toward the woods.
He looked a little dazedly, as he walked, toward the northeast. What
was it, the incredible iron vastness he had glimpsed far away there?
About thirty yards from the plane Price stopped suddenly, his heart
pounding and a sudden sweat breaking on his skin. The grass was
trampled here in an irregular circle, with scars of bare earth ripped
in the ground. There was a large quantity of blood, scarcely dry. A
wide flattened track led to the woods. Something had been killed here,
something big, like a horse or a cow, and the carcass dragged in among
the trees.
Men. Hunters. An animal would have devoured its kill where it lay.
But what kind of men?
Price stood half crouched over the bloody ground, his rifle ready,
looking this way and that and seeing nothing. The hot wind went running
over the prairie and the encircling trees bowed to it and tossed their
branches, but there was no other motion, no other sound. Even the crows
had gone.
Price shouted. "Hello! Hello! Is anybody there? I'm lost. I need help.
Hello!"
His voice was shocking in the stillness, loud and impolite.
There was no answer.
He went on down the flattened track toward the trees. He was afraid,
and desperately tired.
"Hello?" he said, and now his voice was pleading. "Please. Where are
you? Help me--"
_Help me, you men of an unknown future, you hunters in impossibility,
you lurkers in nightmare. Help me, or I die._
The shadows were heavy under the trees. The prairie grass did not grow
here, but there were briars and other things to show a crushed trail.
It was not a long one. He saw the carcass lying in a little glade.
It was a black-and-white cow, already partially butchered. He moved
toward it, and then from the branches overhead and the underbrush on
either side short ropes of braided leather came flying, weighted at
their ends with stones. Price fell down helpless and floundering,
painfully bruised, his arms and legs wrapped in the tough bolo-like
ropes, and one around his neck cutting off his breath so he could not
even cry out.
In a swift and furious rush six men sprang from among the trees and
stood about him. One snatched his rifle, another his revolver. They
wore sketchy garments of tanned leather, and they were as dark and wild
as the Shawnees and Wyandots who had hunted these woodland prairies
long ago, except that some of them had light hair and all of them were
bearded.
One of them, a tall lean wide-shouldered man with a shock of
sun-bleached brown hair and eyes more blue, more blazing and filled
with hate than any Price could remember seeing in his life, crouched
beside him and tore the strangling rope ungently from his neck. Price
tried to speak, but before he could do more than gasp for breath the
brown-haired man whipped out a knife and drove the point of it straight
for Price's throat.
"Now," he said, "you star-spawn--we'll see if your blood is any redder
than the kind we breed on Earth!"
The steel bit hard. Price screamed.