The Time Axis

The efficient part of my mind knew what to do. I left it at that. I had no recollection whatever of fighting the plane out of its power dive or of turning in a long high circle as I got lost altitude back. But that must have happened. Time and distance meant nothing to the half of my mind that floated but the other half very efficiently flew the plane.

'All right now?' De Kalb's voice inquired.

I sat up shakily. The room was swimming around me but it was a familiar room, I could see Dr. Essen bending above a couch and I could see polished boots and a shoulder with something shiny on it. I must have brought Murray back. Murray – dead?

'It was – it was the nekron,' I said thickly.

'I know, I know,' De Kalb said. 'You told us. Don't you remember?'

'I don't remember anything except Murray.'

'I don't think we can save him,' De Kalb said in a flat voice.

'Then he's alive?'

'Just.'

We both looked automatically toward the couch, where Dr. Essen lifted a worried face.

'The adrenalin's helping,' she said, 'But there's no real improvement. He'll sink again as soon as the effect wears off.'

'Can't we get him to a hospital?' I asked.

'I don't think medical treatment will help him,' De Kalb said. 'Dr. Essen has a medical degree, you know. She's already done everything the hospitals have tried on the other victims.

'That creature strikes a place that scalpels and oxygen and adrenalin can't reach. I don't know what or where, but neither do the doctors.' He moved his shoulders impatiently. 'This is the first time the killer hasn't finished its job. You interrupted it, you know – somehow. Do you know how?'

'It was intermittent,' I said hesitantly. 'It kept going away and coming back.' I explained in as much detail as I could. It wasn't easy.

'The plane was moving fast, eh?' De Kalb murmured. 'So. Always before the victims have been practically immobilized. That might explain part of it. If the nekronic creature is vibrating through time it might need a fixed locus in space. And the plane was moving very fast in space. That could explain why the attack was incomplete – but complete enough, after all.'

I nodded. 'This is going to be pretty hard to explain to Murray's headquarters,' I said.

'There's been one call already,' De Kalb told me. 'I didn't say anything. I had to think.' He struck his fist into his palm impatiently and exclaimed: 'I don't understand it! I saw Murray with us in that cave! I saw him!'

'Has it occurred to you, Ira,' Dr. Essen's gentle voice interrupted, 'that what you may have seen in the time- chamber was Colonel Murray's dead body, not Colonel Murray asleep?'

He turned to stare at her.

'It seems clear to me,' she went on, 'that Mr. Cortland is a sort of catalyst in our affairs. From the moment he entered them things have speeded up rather frighteningly. I suggest it's time to make a definite forward move. What do you think, Ira?'

De Kalb frowned a little. 'How's Murray?' he asked.

'He's dying,' she said flatly. 'I know of only one thing that could possibly postpone his death.'

'The neo-hypnosis, you mean,' De Kalb said. 'Well, yes – if it works. We've used it on sleeping subjects, of course, but with a man who is as far gone as Murray, I don't know.'

'We can try,' Dr. Essen said. 'It's a chance. I don't think he'd ever have entered the time-axis of his own volition but this way we can take him along. Things are working out, Ira, very surprisingly.'

'Can we keep him alive until we reach the shaft?' De Kalb asked.

'I think so. I can't promise but – '

'We can't save him,' De Kalb said. 'The People of the Face – maybe. And after all, Murray did go with us. I saw him. Mr. Cortland do you think that plane would carry the four of us as far as the Laurentians?'

'Obviously, Mr. De Kalb,' I said with somewhat hysterical irony, 'obviously, if I guess what you have in mind, it did!'

You could see the shaft-mouth from a long way up, dark above the paler slide of dug earth, and shadowed by the thick green of the Canadian mountains.

It was easier to spot from the air than to reach on foot.

We left the plane in a little clearing at the bottom of the slope. It seemed wildly reckless, but what else could we do? And we carried Murray's body up the mountain with us, De Kalb and I, while Dr. Essen, carrying a square case about two feet through, kept a watchful eye on the unconscious man. Once she had to administer adrenalin to Murray.

I still hadn't come to any decision. I could simply have walked away but that would have meant shutting the last door of escape behind me. I told myself that I'd think of some other way before the final decision had to be made. Meanwhile I went with the others.

'It wouldn't be as though I were running away from punishment,' I told De Kalb wryly as we paused to catch our breath on the lip of the shaft. Tree-tops swayed and murmured below us, and the mountains were warm in the late, slanting sunlight of a summer evening.

'If your theories are right I won't be escaping from anything. The moment I step into your time-trap my alter ego steps out and goes on down the mountain to take his medicine. All I can say is I hope he has a fine alibi ready.'

'He will have – we will have,' De Kalb said. 'We'll have all time at our disposal to think one up in. Remember what our real danger is, Cortland – the nekron. An infection of the mind. An infection of the earth itself and perhaps an infection in our own flesh, yours and mine.

'What it is that I turned loose on the world when I opened that box I don't yet know but I expect to know when I go down that mountain again – ten minutes from now, a million years from now. Both.' He shook his head.

'Let's get on with it,' he said.

8. FANTASTIC JOURNEY

I don't think I ever really meant to embark on that fantastic journey along the time axis. I helped carry Colonel Murray's body down the dusty shaft but it was a nightmare I walked through, not a real experience. I knew at the bottom of the tunnel I'd wake up in my hotel in Rio.

At the foot of the shaft was a hollowed out room. Our flash-beams moved searchingly across the rough walls. We carried Murray into the cave and laid him down gently on a spot the scientist indicated, Dr. Essen immediately became busy with her patient. Presently she looked up and nodded reassuringly.

'There's time,' she said.

But De Kalb waved his arm, sending light sliding erratically up the rock, and said, 'Time – there is time here! This space and this air form one immutable axis upon which all the past and the future turn like a wheel.'

It was bombastic but it was impressive too. Dr. Essen and I were silent, trying to grasp that imponderable concept, trying perhaps to catch the sound of that vast turning. But De Kalb had moved into action.

'Now,' he said, kneeling beside the black suitcase Dr. Essen had set down. 'Now you shall see. Murray is all