Chapter III

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."

Randall's thin brows lifted. "What do you mean?"

Zor Ala's dark eyes mirrored a world of emotion. "The hunter was a magnificent physical specimen," he replied. "The Kralons have use for such as he."

Then Zor Ala told of the sixteen human beings who had not returned from the interviews; told him of the suspicions he had concerning the fate of those humans at the hands of the Kralons.

Throughout the long afternoon Randall kept a check on his companions.

When Jerome Jackson, the last called, finally returned, Randall spoke up.

"Friends," he said. "Twelve of us went to a forced interview with these fantastic creatures of a long-dead Age. Nine of us have returned. Missing are Blake Garnet, Charles McMahon, and his bride, Evelyn McMahon."

Randall paused, then said softly, "I am calling for volunteers."

Angus McClellan took a step forward which carried him half across the room. Gordon Malherne, the young engineer, wasn't far behind him, and the white-haired Doctor Gerard was surprisingly agile for his sixty-odd years.

Jackson, the salesman, was quivering in indecision, when Laura Hanks, the tallest of the teachers, stepped forward.

"You can count me in," she said firmly, her angular chin set in determination.

The instant protest from the men goaded Jackson, and he stepped sheepishly forward to join the others.

"All right," said Randall briskly. "Here's the setup. As soon as it's dark we'll form a human chain and go over the stockade on the side furthest from the gate. I have an automatic and an extra clip of ammunition. Are any of the rest of you armed?"

All shook their heads.

"No matter," Randall continued. "I'll go over first to cover the rest of you."

"But what'll we do then?" protested Jackson. "Why don't we get some of the rest of the people to help?"

Randall examined the fat little man coldly. "Circumstances determine the move," he said. "As for enlisting the aid of the rest of the colony, one man in the enemy's castle is worth a thousand storming the ramparts. We'll leave here at an appointed time and proceed by different routes, all meeting directly across the enclosure from the gate. Now we'd all better get some rest."