Among their new acquaintances was a stocky, pop-eyed physicist with
a fringe of hair like stiff iron wire, who introduced himself as
Gordo Lanson. In the year 2076 he had been experimenting with a new
super-cyclotron and inadvertently had been caught in the almost
inconceivably strong magnetic field used for the acceleration of
electrons in the vast atom smasher.
He had felt a moment of intense vertigo, a wrenching, dimensional sort
of straining of every cell, then he, like the Vator passengers, had
found himself suspended in the huge net.
There were also a dozen orientals, some from Hiroshima and some from
Nagasaki. They had been here since the days of the atomic blasts.
Then there was a thin, dark-skinned chap with strange eyes. He had been
flashing through space on an exploratory trip to Jupiter, when suddenly
his ship had spun into an etheric vortex, one of those enigmatic
whirlpools of magnetic flux which were so deadly to space travel. He,
Dar Mikol, had been torn from 3122, the year of the great space war
between Earth-colonized Mars and its parent planet.
There was a Russian peasant who had been plowing his field in 1688 when
a lightning bolt split the lowering skies and threw him through time
and space to land in the Kralons' net.
There were also fifteen other people from Randall's own time; the
missing Vator passengers of prior trips.
There were a hundred or so more humans in the strange colony, and all
had been drawn to this strange primeval world through some esoteric
passage induced by the Kralons' Time Trap.
"But what is the reason behind it?" Randall asked Zor Ala in
bafflement. "Why do they want us? What do they do with us?"
Before Zor Ala had a chance to reply, a loud click sounded from a small
diaphragm on the wall, then a harsh voice rasped out a dozen words in
crudely accented English.
Randall didn't catch the meaning. He turned questioningly to Zor Ala.
The future man sighed. "The Kralons want to interview the new
arrivals," he said. "You are to wait at the West gate in the stockade."
"And if we don't?" Randall asked.
"I would," Zor Ala said soberly.
Randall shrugged and led his companions across the field.
Jerome Jackson was shaking even more violently than the four school
ma'ams. The fat little salesman's plump cheeks quivered, and his pale
eyes rolled in their sockets.
"Wha--what are they going to do with us now?" he quavered.
Randall examined the man pityingly. "Apparently nothing very serious,"
he said. "Because our new companions over there are still very much
alive."
However, Randall didn't know the full extent of the Kralons'
inhumanity. Zor Ala hadn't had time to tell him that not all the human
arrivals in the world of the Kralons were still in the stockade. There
hadn't been time to discuss the fate of sixteen humans who had never
come back from their appointments with their strange captors!
Just then the stockade door opened and a harsh voice rasped: "First
human will come now."
The companions looked at each other, then Randall started to step
forward, but Blake Garnet was ahead of him. The hunter stepped through
the door, head held high, a saturnine grin on his rugged features.
"Just my meat," he called back. "An ant with Elephantiasis should be
fair prey for a big game hunter."
When the door had closed behind Garnet, Angus McClellan grinned a
little wryly at Randall.
"A great a'nt is sometimes okay," he drawled, "if her name is Sarah,
and she leaves you a pile of jack."
Randall grinned back at him. He recognized the other's wisecracking as
an attempt to keep up the morale of the party.
"Which species do you prefer?" he asked.
The lanky Australian squinted. "Wa--al," he said. "Don't know but what
I'd prefer the Kralons to Aunt Sarah, when she had her dander up."
The companions grinned feebly. It was hard to even attempt
cheerfulness, when God alone knew what might lie on the other side of
that bare metal door.
It seemed hours that they waited for Blake Garnet to come back. But he
never came. Instead, again the door opened, and a harsh voice rasped:
"One more now."
Randall was first this time, with McClellan close at his heels. The
voice rasped sharply: "Only one at a time." And McClellan turned back
slowly.
Randall found himself on a hard smooth path outside the stockade, and
waiting for him was a smaller edition of the gigantic creature he had
glimpsed while he and his companions were in the net.
This Kralon was not much larger than Randall, but the agent shuddered
instinctively at its repulsive appearance, and at the strange,
nauseating odor it exuded.
The creature turned and led the way down the path. Randall followed.
The weird creature led the way into a great high-domed structure of
gray stone. It led Randall down a huge hallway from which hundreds of
openings diverged to lesser corridors leading to other parts of the
massive building. Then the hall they were following evolved into a
great central chamber, lighted with a weird blue glow which emanated
from the walls and ceiling of the huge room.
* * * * *
In a semicircle, facing Randall, sprawled ten enormous Kralons, their
huge mandibles clacking like monstrous telegraph keys. But it was the
central figure which held Randall's attention.
In the center of the semicircle, the eleventh Kralon crouched before
a massive instrument of wood and metal. And as Randall and his guide
entered the room, the monster started to finger a yard-long keyboard
surprisingly similar to that of a huge pipe-organ.
A crudely-accented voice asked in uneven tempo: "What is your name, and
what is your Time Era?"
Randall didn't answer. He hadn't even heard. He was staring with
horrified fascination at the hands of the monster at the keyboard.
Hands which each had four tapering fingers and a thumb, instead of two
opposing claws; hands the delicate hue of old ivory, instead of the
brownish black of the other Kralons' chitinous limbs!
"What is your name, and your Time Era?"
"Randall," he answered, his voice thin and colorless in the huge room.
"Willard Randall. And I'm from the twenty-first Century, A.D."
The mandibles of the huge creatures clacked spasmodically for a moment,
then the Kralon at the instrument, which Randall had recognized as a
sort of Voder, ran those weird, incongruous fingers over the keyboard,
and the instrument spoke again.
"We're sorry," it said. "We had hoped to draw from the more distant
future, when more intelligence could be expected."
"Sorry," said Randall in his flat voice. "Awfully sorry to disappoint
you."
The creature at the instrument looked at him, and Randall wondered
whimsically whether it had recognized the sarcasm.
Then the voice continued, "However, there is the satis--satis--" Even
this fantastic Voder could not cope with the hissing sibilance of an
"F," so the creature finally substituted: "consolation that our Time
Net is working so well. In the end, the law of averages will bring us
what we want."
"May I ask," Randall said, "just what it is you want from us? Why you
were seining the stream of Time, dragging us back into your own age?"
"We want knowledge," it said. "Our race has found that the method
of gleaning information from the future is far preferable to the
painstaking and laborious task of slowly gaining that knowledge through
millennia of blind searching.
"We want to make our civilization the greatest that ever has or ever
will exist. We want to forestall the evolutionary phenomenon in one
phase of the future which apparently brought about a retrograde change
in our race, and an astounding evolutionary development and ascendance
of your species of warm-blooded vertebrates!"
Randall frowned. He couldn't quite grasp the inference of those words.
He had read fantastic stories to Time Travel, to be sure. But this
was something else again. This was a wholesale pilfering of precious
knowledge which only millions of years of miraculous evolution and
heartbreaking effort would in the future eventually produce!
And the Kralon spoke of the future, Randall's future, as only a phase
of the Times to Come. Did the creature mean that the past controlled
the future at will? That if the past were altered, his, Randall's
future, could be wiped out, and a fantastic future of insect supremacy
be substituted?
Randall snorted. It was the age-old paradox of the Time Traveler who
goes into the past and kills his grandfather. Only in this case, the
Kralons were gleaning from a future civilization the knowledge which
would prevent the development of that same civilization!
Sublime absurdity! Things which had sprung into being from Time's
capacious womb could not be relegated to oblivion merely by the selfish
ambitions of the Kralons or any other creatures!
Then Randall remembered with a pang of fear that his own presence in
this fantastic world of the past was apparently a contradiction to that
same logic. If he and his companions could be catapulted into a time
preceding their birth by millions upon millions of years, was it then
so fantastic that the Kralons could alter a future which now existed
only as a memory of Randall and his companions?
He closed his eyes for a moment, then turned again to the huge
creatures who were waiting for him to speak.
"And if we refuse to give you the information you desire?" he asked
tonelessly.
The Voder sputtered in an expression of wrath.
"In that case," it said in response to the Kralon's flying fingers, "In
that case, we can still make use of those who wish to be obstinate!"
"What do you want to know?" he asked.
"We want the secret of atomic power," was the reply. "And the process
for neutralizing gravitation. We want the data on methods for varying
electronic and nuclear structure of atoms, transmutation of elements,
as you call it. We want--"
"But I know nothing of these things!" interrupted Randall. "Even the
most brilliant physicists of my time had just learned the rudiments
of atomic fission and fusion, and they had as yet not even touched
the theory of gravitational neutralization! How can I help you, when
apparently your knowledge is greater than mine?"
"We know," was the reply. "Zor Ala seems to be the only one we have
thus far trapped in our Time Net who came from an era in which those
phenomena were understood. And so far we have been unable to persuade
him to reveal that knowledge."
* * * * *
Apparently the interview was over insofar as Randall was concerned, and
the small Kralon returned and led the agent out another door. Randall
followed his guide back to the stockade where he was met with a storm
of questions from his companions who still waited at the gate. His eyes
searched for Blake Garnet.
When he saw that the man who had preceded him to the interview with the
Kralons was not among them, he went in search of Zor Ala.
The future-man winced when Randall asked him if he had seen Garnet.
"No," he said in a low voice. "Blake Garnet has not returned. He will
never return."