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vengeful anger, the long green eyes cold as ice. But something came between.
A shadow. A thickening silver veil. The shadow grew abruptly real. Breathless,
Lanning rubbed at his eyes, shuddering to the shock of incredulous hope. It
was the
Chronion!
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The Legion of Time
The green glow fading slowly from her polar disks, the time ship landed on the
floor before the throne. Lao Meng
Shan, on the foredeck, turned the Maxim mounted there toward Sorainya and her
creatures and then fell desperately to taking the gun apart, for it was
jammed.
The thin twisted figure of Wil McLan, under his crystal dome, was beckoning
urgently. After that first stunned instant, Lanning caught Barry's arm, and
they ran frantically to climb aboard.
Sorainya screamed a battle cry. With a flashing sweep of her golden sword, she
led her black giants on. A scattering volley from their heavy guns peppered
the
Chronion.
But the turret was turning beneath the dome. The yellow ray flamed upon
Lanning and Halloran from the crystal gun, to pull them to the ship.
Lanning had giimpsed the Wind, bewildered navy airman, Willie Rand, stark and
alone on the deck. But, when he and
Halloran tumbled breathless over the rail, where Shan still bent over the
useless Maxim, Rand was gone.
"Look, Denny!" Barry Halloran was shouting, hoarse with an awed admiration.
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"The damn blind fool!"
He pointed toward Sorainya's horde, and Lanning saw Willie Rand going to meet
them. Bandaged head bent low, he moved at a blind, stumbling run. The broken
Mauser was level in his hands, the whetted bayonet gleaming.
The black warriors paused before that solitary charge, as if bewildered.
Sorainya's fierce shout urged them on. Their guns rattled, and the sailor
staggered. But he ran on.
Lanning stumbled to the speaking tube.
"Wil!" he gasped. "Can we help?"
"No." Wil McLan, under the dome, shook his head. "But it's what he wanted.
Useless but grand!"
Even Sorainya had halted. Her golden needle spat blue fire. Willie Rand
lurched. His clothing began to smoke. But still he lurched on, to" meet the
yellow axes lifted. Lanning had dropped on his knees, to help with the jammed
gun. But he saw Rand come to Sorainya's ranks. He saw the flashing bayonet, as
if guided by some extrasensory vision, drive deep into a black thorax.
The golden axes fell
The Secret of the Brick
77
But Wil McLan, on his bridge, had spun his shining wheel, and the
Chronion was gone from Sorainya's hall, back into the blue shimmering gulf of
her own timeless track. Lanning reeled through the turret, where Duffy Clark
was now on duty behind the crystal gun, and up to join Wil McLan in the dome.
The old man seized his arm, desperately.
"Denny? You got it?"
"Yes. But how'd you happen to meet us? And where's Barinin?"
"They found us on the ledge," breathed the voiceless man. "Turned down a
gyrane ray, from the battlements. Barinin was caught at the gun. Crisped!" He
shuddered.
"We had to take off. I drove on into the future, to avoid their time ship. I
was afraid to enter the fortress with the ship when we couldn't explore it
with the search beam, there was too much danger of collision with some solid
object, with very disastrous results.
"But nothing else was left. We had to take the risk -and we won." He mopped
sweat from his scar-seamed face.
"That hall was the largest room. From my plans, and a study of the ruins in
futurity, I approximated its position. And we came back to where it had been.
"But the object you recovered?"
Lanning handed him the glazed black brick.
"Open it up," the old man rasped. "We've got to discover where Glarath and
Sorainya found it, hi time and space, and replace it there."
Lanning lifted his eyes from the little block that was the foundation of all
Jonbar. Anxiously, he caught at McLan's twisted arm. "Do you think ? Will they
follow?"
"Of course they'll follow." McLan's hollow eyes glazed with dread. ""This
means life and death to them. And they have their own time ship. If they fail
to overtake us on the way, they will surely be waiting where the object must
be placed. They know the spot." He returned the brick to Lanning. "See if you
can break it open."
The block was glass-hard. Lanning tapped at it vainly, broke his pocket knife
on it, then carried it down to the deck. It yielded at last to hack saw,
chisel, and sledge. It proved to be a thick-walled box, packed with white
fiber.
78
The Legion of Time
His quivering fingers lifted the packings to uncover a thick, V-shaped piece
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of rusty iron.
His vague, wild expectations had been all of something spectacular: perhaps
some impressive document of state upon which history should have turned, or
the martyr's weapon that might have asassinated some enemy of progress. Sick
with disappointment, he carried the thing back to Wil McLan.
"Just a piece of scrap iron," he said. "A rusty old magnet, out of the magneto
of a Model T. And we spent all those lives to find it!"
"No matter what it is," the old man whispered. "It was important enough, when
Sorainya wrenched it out of the past, to deflect the whole direction of
probability to break the last geodesies of Jonbar.
"Now, with the chronoscope, I must try to find where it belongs. Then we must
put it bacjc if Sorainya allows us!"
He looked up at Lanning. "But you're all in, Denny. You've been hurt."
Lanning had hardly been conscious of fatigue. Even the ring and throb of pain
in the back of his brain had become endurable, a vague and distant phenomenon
that did not greatly matter. He felt a great surprise, now, when the dome went
black and he knew that he was falling to the floor.
13
SEED OF FUTURITY
LANNING WOKE, with his head bandaged, lying in the little green-walled
hospital. Barry Holloran grinned at him from the opposite bed. The little
cockney, Duffy Clark, came presently with a covered tray.
"Cap'n McLan?" he drawled. "Why, 'e's lookin' inter 'is bloomin' gadgets,
tryin' to find where that she-devil and 'er blarsted hants got 'old of that
magnet."
Seeds of Futurity
79
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