Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: Time Trap by Long Frank Belknap Mayan Earl Illustrator
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page
Ebook has 115 lines and 7658 words, and 3 pages
"I even forgot for a moment how insane the whole thing was. He was gasping for breath, so I put the helmet back on, and gave the oxygen tube a double twist to straighten it out. But an instant before the helmet descended over his mouth he managed to stammer, 'I was up in the attic playing--'
"Playing 'Pirate's den!' I had spent the happiest years of my boyhood in the attic, pretending I was Captain Kidd, or climbing out on the tree that arched over our house when the December snows weighed it down, and making myself out to be in the crow's nest of an arctic windjammer!
"As I swayed there beside myself my mind followed crazy-paved paths in all directions. Great chunks of the past seemed to float before me--like icebergs nine-tenths submerged.
"But all the while the sanest part of my mind was seeking an explanation that would one-tenth explain it! I gripped my own boy-self by the shoulder to make sure he'd stay solid until the man he'd become could get a mental toe-hold on the problem.
"If you can persuade a man to mount a stepladder and plant himself firmly on the air you've taken your first brave step into the unknown. The poor devil may or may not fall. But at least you've made a start in the right direction.
"It isn't too hard to believe that certain things can happen to Time on the wrong side of yesterday--or tomorrow! Time--the physicists tell us--never stops flowing. It's like a melting candle or silk before it hardens on the loom--all crinkled up and sparkling like a dew-drenched spider web.
"If Time melts in a back-of-yesterday dimension what's to stop a man from dissolving with it, and running in a thin trickle back to his yesterdays? You were a boy once and you could be a boy again--without ceasing to be a man.
"Put it this way. On the dark side of the moon there was a valley of shadows. A big, blundering fool went stumbling into it, and landed in a heap. Before he could pick himself up a part of himself dissolved in some unimaginable backwash of time, and he became a boy again. His boy-self split off from him, and went stumbling off over the plain in a suit five sizes too large for him.
"It's not as impossible as it sounds. The boy you were still exists in Time, and he could emerge from the past to stand beside you in a vortex of dissolving Time. Was there something in the valley that could change the flow of time, reverse it, and twist it around like butter in a churn?
"Through the pane of his helmet his eyes burned accusingly into mine. But it wasn't until he halted directly in front of me and lifted the helmet from his head that I knew what my crime was and why he found it hard to forgive me.
"I had committed the crime of living beyond my alloted span! The man facing me was old ... old. His face was still my face, but if ever I had been young and handsome and a target for the wiles of a pretty woman I was so no longer!
"He seemed to realize that I could hardly bear to look upon myself as I would be, for he spoke sharply, quickly, without attempting to explain his presence, or even to prepare me for what he had to say by working up to it like a story-teller with a great load of unimaginable horror on his mind.
"'It's a monstrous beast of prey!' he croaked. 'It can dissolve Time and re-shape Time in a hundred horrible ways!'
"He quirked his head at me. 'You know more than that lad but I know more than you--for I have lived through this moment before! Once long ago I stood in this cave and warned you! You are at the crossroads of a branching future! If you take the right turn now you will live to become me. But, if you take the wrong turn--'
"He straightened, and pointed with his gloved forefinger into the shadows behind me. 'It is there--at your back! When you turn you will see the shining web which it uses to dissolve Time! All over this valley the creature has thrown a Time-dissolving web of force!'
"His voice rose warningly. 'It is as intelligent as we are, but it moves with glacial slowness. An inch in an hour--a foot in a day! When it dissolves Time it nourishes itself by drawing the energy-whirl into itself, and spinning it out again in another form, like an immense, living shuttlecock. A spider--'
"He looked at me with a haggard intensity of appeal. 'It will try to hold you with the web--to hold you in complete helplessness until you become a hundred lads and a hundred men. You'll be an infant, a boy of five, a lad of twenty, and a man older than myself. But every time you split up in the folds of the web you'll lose a part of your substance.
"'You'll cease to be a man with a past and a future. You'll become a mere hollow shell--no more substantial than I am, and I am little more than a wraith. You'll be drained, and you'll vanish like a puff of smoke. You'll be devoured and swallowed up!'
"He was struggling for breath and the veins on his forehead had begun to swell. 'You've got to blast it down before the web dazzles and confuses you! You'll have to face it to blast, but if you fight it with your mind--'
"Suddenly the helmet was back on his head and he was turning from me. He moved straight toward the lad and put a palsied hand on the shoulder of that younger me.
"Then, slowly, they both turned to face me, and I could see their eyes inside their helmets, trained upon me in desperate appeal. At least--there was appeal in the eyes of the old one. The lad may have been merely terrified, and confused.
"He couldn't have been more terrified than I was as the shadows lengthened about me, and a coldness crept into my bones.
"I knew I'd have to come to grips with the web. I knew, too, that if it was behind me I'd be safer facing it. When there's something unspeakable at your back, you can die so many deaths just waiting for it to make its presence known that all the courage and decision goes out of you.
"Panic smote me as I turned, hip and thigh like a flat sword. But all I could see for an instant was a faint, moving radiance blending with the shadows, a kind of nebulous flowing in the darkness on the far side of the cave.
"My hand must have closed on my blaster, for I could feel the bite of cold metal against my palm. But there was something about the light that my will could not withstand. My arms seemed to freeze as I stared at it, and terrifying thoughts rushed into my brain.
"At first I experienced only a feeling of almost unbearable oppression. Then something in the glow seemed to reach out toward me and there was no sound in the cave but the beating of my heart.
"A ghastly something seemed to be watching me with a kind of fiendish triumph, as though the soul of a devil lurked in the depth of the light which could send out vampire tendrils, filmed with writhing menace.
"I couldn't tear my eyes from the glow and the longer I stared the worse it got.
"The light seemed filled with an evil purpose. It writhed and changed shape as I stared at it, seeming to sweep out through the walls of the cave and back again with a pulsing greediness.
"Then, gradually, it ceased to blend with the shadows. It became stationary and transparent, hanging suspended in the murky air like a gigantic burning glass.
"As though in a dream-delirium I became slowly aware that a picture was forming within it. A valley swept into view, walled with high, saw-toothed mountain ranges.
"Deep in the weaving radiance I could see a tiny, plodding figure coming toward me across the valley.
"For an instant I thought I was looking at the far-off image of a human figure plodding over the plain. A figure clad in a heavy space-suit, moving awkwardly--as I had moved.
"Nearer it came and nearer, its reflection floating on ahead of it, bobbing about like a little ship.
"It swerved abruptly as I stared, made a full turn, and soared into the air. It flew straight toward me, its wings beating the air as though it were struggling against a furious uprush of wind.
"There was a sloping wall of light-dappled rock at the edge of the radiance, and for an instant the winged shape disappeared behind it. I didn't see it descend.
"I saw only a shadow forming behind the rock, and swirling out from it. It came into view again abruptly, dragging its wings behind it, hobbling toward me over the ice.
"My spine congealed. The thing that had crossed the valley was a monstrous bird of prey. It was wearing a space-suit, but no helmet, and I could see its vulture-like head bobbing about in the glow.
"It seemed to be in pain. It had halted at the edge of the glow, as if fearful of what lay beyond it, and suddenly as I stared it began furiously to pluck and tear at its breast with its taloned foreclaws.
"So frenzied were the creature's exertions that the front of its space-suit came away in shreds. The hideous creature had scales on its breast instead of feathers, and a pulsing, lizardlike throat ... a throat which turned red as it continued to inflict cruel injuries on itself.
"The impression I got was one of agonized despair, of a creature trapped and cornered that could only escape by destroying itself. Again and again it slashed at its flesh, twisting about in the glow, its eyes brimming with agony.
"Then, suddenly, it was no longer alone. A little bird-lizard shape had materialized at its side and was going through the same grisly pantomime.
"As I blinked in stunned disbelief a third shape swam into view--and a fourth. The eyes of the third shape were dull and opaque, like frosted glass, and the fourth shape was so atrophied that the scales on its breast seemed to overlap, squeezing out the flesh between them.
"Then, abruptly, the first shape began to grow transparent. It shriveled and glistened, and I could see its skeleton gleaming beneath the glassy transparency of its dissolving flesh.
"It vanished in a gush of gray light, so quickly that the air about it had a sucked-in look. Swiftly, terribly, the other shapes converged toward that swirling vacuum and were swallowed up, as though with their passing Time had collapsed in upon itself.
"It wanted me to know that--to realize that my time was short. So it had brought back a scene out of the past to unnerve me, and sap my will!
"Could I go on taking it? I hadn't much time to think about it--for the web was filling with another picture. A living shuttlecock, the old one had called it. So now it was weaving another picture for me on Time's dissolving loom.
"It was a picture so hideous I could hardly bring myself to believe in it. It was a picture of still another me. But if the old one had seemed palsied, wretched, at the end of his endurance--the face that stared out at me from the radiance was a thousandfold more so!
"It was a face that had lost itself in Time--a face that was all sagging jowls and puckered brows, a toothless, yellowed caricature of a face.
"Looking at myself as I would be--I suddenly had no longer any desire to live. A small, shrill voice shrieked within me that the monstrous, living shuttlecock desired just that--that it was resorting to a devilish subterfuge!
"But I did not heed the voice. I just stood there, waiting to die, hoping that the end would come quickly.
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page