Chapter IX: Ill Wind

In the sky, high, high up--a stubby-winged drone circled above Albuquerque thrice. Then it streaked away from the city and headed toward Alamogordo. The pillar of fire was vicious and intolerably bright and it silhouetted the fleet drone--though no one could stand to watch the scene, regardless of the thickness of his eye-glasses.

To all intents and purposes the drone vanished.

But on the viewscreen in Harry Maddox's laboratory the pillar of fire grew, expanded into the entire screen, covered it and made steering ambiguous until Maddox dropped the nose of the fleet little craft so that the field of view included the base of the atomic flame.

The drone arrowed on and on and then came to a machine-made landing a few thousand feet from the base of the flame. Maddox worked swiftly now, for the heat of that devilish fire would ruin the equipment in all too short a time. The equipment went to work.

Then, like the snuffing of a candle flame, the scene went dark. The pillar of fire disappeared and there was a thunderous roar as miles of tortured air raced in to fill the vacuum created by the sudden absence of intolerable heat.

The thunderings shook the city of Albuquerque and the buildings rattled.

In one of the homes Ed Bronson was shaken into wakefulness. He was lying on the floor which was hard though not cold.

He awoke dully. He felt the floor and had a quick impression of having fallen from bed. Grinning sheepishly, Ed Bronson stood up and turned. There was no bed!

The thunderings diminished slowly and Bronson shook his head in wonder. It had not been thunderstorm weather earlier this afternoon. But there was no bed!

"_Virginia!_" he called, running from the room.

His house was empty of people. In fact his house was refurnished completely. That fact he accepted dully, wondering what had happened and why. It was too great a concept for him to grasp at once. He stared dully at the strange rugs, chairs, appointments. He went into his laboratory--

And found a complete nursery. In one corner was a crib but the infant was missing. It had been used recently, for the bedding was warm--and a bit damp.

Bronson's mind whirled. Strange--strange. But not too strange, considering. If _they_ were capable of sending some of their cohorts through the veil that separated the two worlds, it was equally possible for them to reach forth and grab someone from the other world.

Bronson cursed angrily.

He left the house quickly because he knew that, regardless of how he had come here, he was an interloper. Bronson assumed that any of the enemy who might be reaching for him--probably to prevent his forestalling of their efforts--would not merely slip him through the barrier and let him run loose.

Whether something had gone awry in their transmission plans he did not know, but he guessed that something had interfered because no man attempting to grab an enemy would do other than to grab quickly and keep him under supervision.

So Bronson left the house quickly.

He was an interloper--and, though helpless to do anything but run, he was infinitely better off with his freedom than in capture, jail or, more probably, death.

Killing him on his own world would bring about the rather complex problem of disposing of the corpse. While this is possible, it is difficult to dispose of such a high degree of absolute contraband in a civilization with which you are not over-familiar. So some lucky accident had brought Bronson into this ill-fated Earth Two in a residence instead of the laboratory or military establishments of the imminent invaders.

* * * * *

Outside, Bronson knew that something was wrong. He wondered what it was. It was vague, something that was missing from a mere sketchy description but something rather important from a secondary--or was it primary--viewpoint, something that did not jell.

It was late afternoon. The sun was setting in the west. But there was no pillar of atomic fire in the sky!

The Miss Carlson of Earth Two had said that all of Albuquerque was illuminated by the vastness of the pillar of incandescent flame that reached from horizon to the sky. Where in the name of thunder--

The whirling madness spiraled in Bronson's mind with the never-ending round of who, what, why, when and where. And driving that engine of madness was the ever-present and ever-growing fear that the earth he knew was threatened with death--while he could do nothing but stand by and watch it die.

And join it....

The light disappeared like the snuffing of a candle, and Maddox turned to Kingston with a grim smile. "That's that," he said.

Kingston nodded affably. "Now all we have to do is to complete our plans."

Maddox shook his head. "Remember that the stuff in Bronson's laboratory is the only supercritical mass on Earth One. We can see through, of course, but without that focal point we cannot cross over." He turned and left the drone-control room, walking down the corridor towards the other laboratory with Kingston beside him. Kingston was silent for a moment.

Then he nodded in self-satisfaction. "I'll send through a corps of guards to protect it until we need it."

"Better yet," said Maddox, "send through a couple of technicians to separate it into subcritical masses until we need it. Then we can prevent Earth Two from crossing."

They turned the corner of the hallway and entered the original laboratory. As they did so, Kingston caught the sight of the viewscreen and stopped short, his jaw dropping. On the screen was the view of Bronson's laboratory. Virginia was sitting idly in a chair watching the equipment.

Her attitude was not one of complete relaxation, nor was it one of deep intent. Maddox and Kingston knew at once that Virginia was waiting while the equipment ran automatically.

Maddox leaped to the controls of his viewer and followed the cone of energy from the crystal to Ed Bronson's bedroom. There he saw the reason for the work. Ed Bronson's wraithlike body was in the last stages of its disappearance from Earth One.

"So," snapped Maddox. "That takes care of him!"

"Rather clever, too," said Kingston, admiringly. "That's getting rid of a body without fuss or bother or corpus delicti arising somewhere to confront--My Lord! What's she doing?"

Virginia, having seen the equipment come to its end of operation, had run into the bedroom to check on whether Bronson had been transmitted. Maddox had followed her back to Bronson's laboratory and Virginia was opening the tube. She removed the crystalline mass and carried it to the toolbench. Here she placed it on a two-foot slab of mild steel used as a surface plate and was reaching for a hammer with her right hand while her left hand groped for the cold chisel.

Kingston's question was hypothetical. Both men knew what Virginia was about to do.

"Quick!" snapped Kingston. "Stop her!"

"Check!" grunted Maddox, his hands leaping across the control panel.

From the crystal between chisel and surface plate came the beam of invisible energy that enfolded Virginia in its grasp. Unlike the slow process of her own machines, the highly efficient techniques of Earth Three effected the transfer in a matter of milliseconds.

Virginia felt the wrench of a twisted spatial continuum, felt the change as her body adjusted in level and knew briefly that somehow something had gone terribly wrong. The scene before her eyes changed like a flash-over in a moving picture and she faced Maddox and Kingston.

"No you don't," said Kingston roughly.

It was quite wrong. Her trained mind told her that in an instant. Her first brief fear had been that someone from her own world had interrupted her machinations and had grabbed her to prevent the completion of her plans. That would have been quite logical.

But the time interval had been too short. That proved to Virginia that it was not of her own world, for had there been any acceleration in the transfer process, she would have been notified. It was--to her logical mind--quite improbable that such an advance could have been made in the space-resonant techniques in the course of the few short hours during which she had been absent from her own laboratory.

Therefore, she reasoned, there was more to this than met the eye.

* * * * *

She recoiled before the men. Maddox smiled sourly at her and Kingston gloated. "Going to reduce that crystal so that no one could follow you," said Kingston.

"Where--"

Kingston smiled with self-gratification. He felt grandiose enough to gloat a bit more. "This," he said expansively, "is what we term Earth Three."

"Three?" she echoed hollowly.

"Some very brilliant people," chuckled Kingston, "reasoned that there was the possibility of two outcomes to Alamogordo. But they never even considered the possibility of the bomb failing completely. This is the world where the bomb failed."

"Failed!" said Virginia, completely overwhelmed with the implications. Her tone was hollow, almost a psychopathic parroting of Kingston's words. "Failed but...." she was incoherent.

Kingston smiled again. "After all," he said, "the Alamogordo Test was made to determine whether or not the bomb would actually work. Even the finest brains of the day were not certain--and there was the possibility of failure."

"But--"

"Here we are," said Kingston simply.

"But if there was failure?" said Virginia falteringly, but with gaining confidence, "how is it that you are so very well advanced?"

"The failure of the bomb was temporary. A later model worked. But in our world science is completely free and untrammeled. Unlike your world, Virginia Carlson, where science is deeply regulated and directed at one and only one idea, our science knows neither bonds nor interference.

"If you ever get outside in our world you will see atomic power in its fullest use. You will see advances made that are and will always be impossible in any system where a man or a group of men can direct in any way the course of science."

Virginia nodded glumly. "I know," she said. "I've always known of the openings into fields of science that might lead to great things but they were closed because of the necessity of pursuing the one idea toward our future."

Kingston nodded. He admitted the unhappy fact but his own position was none too certain--or had not been until recently.

"If your world is so excellent," asked Virginia bitterly, "why...?"

"The time is approaching when only one future can remain," said Kingston. "No one but an utter egomaniac would consider that the entire universe is regulated for the benefit of mankind. We have yet to make a real attempt to reach the other planets. Have you ever considered the rather impossible proportions of this temporal fission? I doubt it.

"Is, for instance, there a complete universe for each of the time-trails? Or if Earth One and Earth Three both sent rockets to Venus would they meet because Venus was common to both time streams? Think of the energy required to separate a complete universe and ask yourself whether you think it possible."

"Energy has little to do with it," replied Virginia. "Who knows the functioning of the thing we call time--possibly for the want of a better word. Who knows why we have trepidation? Certainly the energy required to cause a planet to falter in its orbit is not truly expended but trepidation is caused by something that seems to require little or no energy."

"We're far from the original premise," said Kingston. "We may never know whether or not the temporal paths are merely local or widespread. It is not a matter of organic versus inorganic matter, for neither is controlled nor directed from any of the other streams of time.

"Were this not so, every time a workman lays a brick on Earth One the same brick would move and be cemented in situ on the other two worlds. And a car on the street might have an accident with a car common to all three worlds but driven only by a driver on Earth One.

"The point is," continued Kingston, "that the time is coming when this triple existence must cease. Again it is the old principle of the survival of the fittest. I am not a firm believer in a god, either benevolent or vicious. Yet there is--or was--some agency that effected this split because it was uncertain as to outcome."

"What hope could there have been for Earth Two?" complained Virginia bitterly.

"Who knows?" replied Kingston. "There might have emerged from her bitter necessity a solution of a lot of ills. Certainly I know that, with the entire world working against that fatal menace, few differences of ideology remain. In Earth Two, Virginia, the lion and the lamb have lain together.

"In fact," grinned Kingston, "you might be closer to allegory to state that the eagle and the bear have a lot in common with lions, dragons and others. It is," he admitted rather unhappily, "a factor that we, here, have not been able to accomplish."

"An ill wind--" said Virginia bitterly.

"True," nodded Kingston. "But the fact remains that the three time paths diverged because of some uncertainty. These same time paths must ultimately come to one ending. We do not know the future--no one does--but this we do know--That world which has the best factor of survival will emerge as the one and only Earth.

"We," said Kingston proudly, "have the best technical perfection, so in any strife we must win. Therefore we are the ones to survive and we are working toward that end. That is why we grabbed you. Your world is doomed. We must ensure the doom of Earth One so that Earth Three is the only one left."

* * * * *

Kingston turned to Maddox. "I think we might be wise to collect Ed Bronson too," he said. "No use letting him run free. Find him and bring him through too."

Maddox nodded and went to work on the controls, setting the dial that determined the depth of penetration to Earth Two. He worked rapidly, sweeping the house that was cojacent with the house on Earth One.

"Heck!" snapped Kingston. "He can't have gone very far. Of course she sent him to her chums. Find them!"

Maddox nodded and located Virginia's laboratory with ease. Moray and Cauldron were there, working on the gear, but obviously getting nowhere. Kingston shrugged. "Cover every place they might conceal Bronson," he directed.

To Virginia, he added, "It is most convenient that Earth Three lies on the other side of Earth One from Earth Two. Were this not so, the fumbling of your friends to penetrate the barrier between the streams of time might cause them to stumble on us."

"Why can't they get through to One?" asked the girl.

Kingston smiled. "Within the hour," he said, "four keys will unlock four safety deposit boxes in four different banks in Albuquerque. Each box contains one subcritical mass of space-resonant elements. My men are finishing the job you started, but this time the key to invasion lies in my hands!" He turned to Maddox, who was fumbling with the controls. "Find him yet?" he demanded.

"No," grumbled Maddox.

Kingston turned to Virginia. "You want to live," he told her in a very matter-of-fact voice, "and therefore it is to your interest to see that we do not permit Bronson to harm our plans. Where is he?"

"I don't know," said the girl. "I merely sent him through."

"You are a brazen little traitor," snapped Kingston. "I believe you! You merely sent him through, you cared not where."

Maddox spoke up. "That equipment she flanged up isn't the most accurate," he said. "But I've covered the entire neighborhood. You know, the closest mass of focal elements lies across the street, in Earth Two, in the laboratory of Virginia Carlson. Therefore, lacking direction and precision, she'd have sent him through to the focal zone of her own gear."

Virginia gasped. Partially blinded as she had been, half-aware of the duplicity of her surroundings, close in the near-paralytic grip of the transmission equipment, Virginia had retained sufficient cognizance to know most definitely that when she looked through the veil, she had been looking into a room that parallelled Bronson's laboratory in shape, size and window-placement.

It was not similar to her own. In her haste she had paid it little attention. Her only thought had been to dispose of the man. Knowing that there were no other critical masses on Earth One, she had felt that anywhere he went was elsewhere.

The implication was clear enough. She had sent Ed Bronson into Earth Three, a simple mistake due to the fact that Two and Three were situated almost equally distant and on opposite sides of Earth One. Obviously, the crude equipment had selected the nearer critical mass--which had been on Earth Three in a cojacent house and not through to Earth Two and across the street to Virginia's own laboratory.

Bronson, then, was on Earth Three, somewhere.