Chapter IV

That evening when a thin crescent crept wanly into the sky, five figures faded into the ebon night and slunk across the broad field.

When the five had met in the dim shadow of the towering stockade, Randall whispered softly: "When I'm over the barrier, I'll let you know if the coast is clear, then step on it! We're going to try to make it as far as the entrance to the big building. Then we'll decide on our next step. Okay, let's go."

Gordon Malherne braced his hands against the stockade, motioned Jackson to climb on his shoulders. When the salesman was set, Doctor Gerard clambered to his shoulders, and Randall followed up the human ladder with Angus McClellan close behind.

When the two reached the top of the stockade, they wedged themselves between the sharpened ends of two piling, reached down and grasped the Doctor's hand and pulled him up. Then Randall removed his belt, asked for Gerard's. He buckled them end to end into a strap long enough to reach Jackson's clawing hands. The salesman clung while the engineer scrambled over his body and up the strap, then the three men hauled the perspiring Jackson to the top.

After a quick look below him, the little agent swung over the sharpened ends of the piling, hung by his hands for a moment, then dropped to the ground outside the stockade. In a moment he signalled the others to follow.

Silently they scurried through the night toward the massive central building which McClellan had dubbed "The Hive." Safe in the deeper gloom of its entry, they paused at Randall's whispered command.

"Here's the plan," Randall said softly. "There are half a hundred corridors branching from the main hallway. We'll each explore one corridor, and if anyone finds any clue as to what has happened to Garnet or the McMahons, he'll return to the main hallway at once and wait for the rest. Satisfactory?"

Everyone nodded but Jackson. "That's all very well for you," the fat man protested. "You're armed, but how about the rest of us?"

Randall silently extended his automatic, butt first. Jackson lost any possible remaining respect his companions might have possessed for him when he accepted the gun and turned sheepishly down one of the corridors.

Randall found himself in a narrow, arched passage dimly illuminated by small glowing studs set in the walls. He glanced quickly behind him, then started on a soundless trot down the passage, staying close to the right wall, and pausing occasionally to listen at the frequent panels which broke the monotony of the walls.

Once a panel slid open a hundred feet down the hall ahead of him, and one of the diminutive Kralons emerged and, luckily, started down the corridor away from Randall.

Randall waited until the creature had gained a considerable lead, then followed cautiously. At length he came to an open arch at the end of the corridor, and, in what appeared to be a lounging salon, he saw a number of the small Kralons busy at enigmatic occupations, their mandibles clacking in weird conversation.

Randall shrugged, turned and made his way back along the corridor. When he arrived at the main hallway, he found Angus McClellan crouched back in the darkness of the entry, waiting for him. The lank Australian grinned weakly.

"Found somethin'," he said huskily. "Don't know what, but I heard human voices. Screams, rather. We'd better hurry."

Randall thought wistfully of his automatic, then nodded and followed McClellan down the corridor until the Australian stopped before a panel and jerked a thumb. Randall put his ear to the panel. For a moment he heard nothing. Then came a scream, a human scream that told of extreme agony; anguish beyond the unbearable pain of the ancient rack!

Randall's face was chalky white as he turned, looked at McClellan for a split second, then rasped, "Let's go!"

Together, they stepped back, then threw their combined weight against the panel.

* * * * *

When Jerome Jackson left his companions and crept sheepishly down the dim corridor with Randall's automatic clutched tightly in one pudgy hand, he came closer to hating himself than he ever had before in all his introverted, cowardly existence.

His mind skimmed back over the miserable pages of his life. Born on the wrong side of the tracks in a mid-western city, he had lacked the innate ability and courage to grow above his inheritance. Rather, he had allowed his childhood handicaps to reduce the advantages of a series of lucky breaks to an extremely mediocre existence. He was a reasonably successful salesman only by virtue of a perpetual hang-dog look which brought a momentary feeling of magnanimity to his prospective customers.

All in all, Jerome Jackson could not under any circumstance be expected to make the most of any situation, much less this almost foolhardy venture which Randall had precipitated.

Jackson realized his own limitations as he crept miserably down the dim corridor, and was actually regretting that he, rather than Randall had the revolver, when he heard a sound behind one of the panels. Leaning close, he heard the low throb of massive machinery and the high-pitched whine of generators.

He stopped and peered at the panel searchingly. He noticed a glowing stud set in the casement, and after a moment's hesitation he pressed it. The panel slid back smoothly. Jackson looked up and down the hallway, then stepped cautiously through the door.

He found himself in a great high-domed room filled with ordered ranks of mighty but absolutely incomprehensible machinery, all humming enigmatic paens of power. Far down the serried ranks of gargantuan equipment he saw a light glinting on mighty crystal tubes.

With hypnotic fascination, Jackson advanced slowly through the maze of humming mechanisms. The closer he came to those enigmatic tubes, the wider his pale eyes opened, until, as he stood at the base of the rod-high crystal cylinders, he looked like a puppet registering amazement and consternation.

* * * * *

Doctor Gerard held neither Jerome Jackson's cowardly fear of danger, nor Randall's contempt for it. While there were important scientific facts to be learned, danger didn't count. It just didn't exist insofar as he was concerned.

Consequently it wasn't at all surprising that Gerard stepped right into a regular hornet's nest of trouble.

The little Doctor had been counting doors on his way down the corridor, more from scientific habit than anything else, and on the seventh door to his right, he noticed a very strange insignia. It was a weird diagrammatic inscription which immediately caught his interest.

Emblazoned in the central panel in glowing outline was a triangle enclosing a huge multi-faceted eye. As Gerard stared at the weird orb in its geometrical figure he suddenly recalled that a similar figure had been used by ancient necromancers and later by hypnotists, as a symbol of their questionable accomplishments.

Puzzledly he wondered whether its use here in this fantastic world of the past held any esoteric connection with its meaning in the far-distant future. Without stopping to consider potential consequences, he pushed the stud which opened the panel, and stepped inside.

When his eyes finally became accustomed to the even deeper gloom, he saw that the room was filled with a number of coffin-like glass cabinets and an equal number of switchboards crowded with dials and levers. Slowly he edged toward one of the crystal cabinets and peered down into its dimly illumined interior.

He saw a number of oval white objects resting on tiered trays, for all the world like eggs in an incubator. Then Gerard realized that was exactly what these instruments were. Incubators! But they were Kralon eggs, not chicken eggs. Furthermore, it was obvious that the elaborate instruments which adjoined the incubators had a far more involved function than merely maintaining the eggs at incubation temperature.

Doctor Gerard's grizzled eyebrows lifted in interest as he turned back to examine the dials. Both the design of the controls and the hieroglyphics engraved upon them were entirely incomprehensible to him.

He shrugged his shoulders, then began to turn every triangular control on the panel to its extreme limit.

Nothing untoward happened during the alteration of the first two settings, but when Gerard threw over the third, all hell broke loose in that dim crypt!

Violet light danced between the poles of circuit breakers and ate away the metal like butter. Great gongs dinned a cacophony of sound through the lurking dusk of the room, then were suddenly silent as brilliant lights flashed on.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, Gordon Malherne had also engineered something for which his text books had provided no solution.

After leaving his four companions, he had started down the corridor furthest to the right.

"Always go right," he told himself whimsically as he crept noiselessly down the dim hallway. "And you'll never go wrong."

However, this must have been the exception which proved the rule, for Malherne hadn't gone a dozen yards when things started to happen.

A double panel just ahead and to his left slid open and a column of small worker Kralons, two abreast, started marching into the corridor.

The two leaders saw the engineer almost simultaneously, and both started for him with mandibles clacking furiously.

Malherne started on a dead run for the "Hive" entrance. Behind him he heard the harsh rustle of chitin-clad limbs.

It seemed for a moment as though he were gaining, then the foremost insect lunged and caught his jacket. It threw Malherne off stride, and he caromed against the wall of the corridor. He regained his balance almost instantly, but he had lost ground, and he felt another limb clutch his right arm.

He jerked to a stop, pivoted suddenly in an attempt to dislodge the hold. His motion threw the foremost Kralon into the one immediately behind, and the human and the two huge insects went down in a heap.

When Malherne hit the floor under a tangle of limbs, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a knife, snapping the spring blade open in the same motion.

He slashed viciously at everything which touched him, and was rewarded with a raucous clatter of mandibles and the sticky feel of a warm liquid which spattered his hands and face and rendered his knife almost too slippery to hold.

He pulled free from the two mangled Kralons, slashed at a third which had hooked through the fabric of his sleeve. Then he went down as a heavy blow caught him in the temple.

When consciousness pushed through the haze, Malherne found himself back in the stockade. He was lying on a crude bed in the main hut. Zor Ala was bending over him.

"How do you feel?" the man from the 43rd century asked solicitously. "It appears that you encountered a little trouble."

Malherne gingerly felt the lump on his temple. "So I did," he grimaced. "But how did I get here? Did those entomological nightmares really let me live, even after I carved them up?"

Zor Ala nodded somberly. "For awhile, at least," he said. "They intend to drain all knowledge possible from any of the 'fish' they catch from the future before the--" He shrugged, left his sentence unfinished.

"But your companions," he continued. "Where are they?"

Malherne winced. "Still somewhere in the Hive, I guess. I got caught before I got started. Let's hope the others have better luck. I'm still alive, though," he added thoughtfully. He stretched painfully, then sat up, grimacing as the wrenched muscles responded.

"Zor Ala," he said, "how does it happen that these insects are so much further advanced way back here in time, while in my day insects apparently have nothing but complex instincts? Seems as though they should have progressed up the evolutionary scale the same as everything else."

The future-man shook his head, sat down on the crude bench. "No one knows what happened to the Kralons after the Carboniferous Period," he said. "Nor does anyone understand why later insects retrogressed from the logical thinking of the Kralons' level of intellect, back to a mere set of complex instincts.

"We do know that the Kralons made a mighty stride ahead of the rest of Earth life many millions of years ago. They've admitted to me that they have not progressed at all for untold ages now, and they're very worried. They don't know why they do not progress in an evolutionary sense as the rest of the life forms seem to be doing.

"And they are exceedingly worried about the future, for we have let them know that apparently the Kralon race vanished around the end of the Carboniferous Period, leaving only diminutive descendants with instinct rather than intelligence to show that their race might ever have existed.

"Of course, we of the future know that there is another similar parallel in the disappearance of the dinosaurs. As you probably have read in paleontological treatises, those huge reptiles seemed to have had everything their own way through the late Triassic, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous Periods."

The engineer nodded. "I remember a paragraph from Gamow's 'Biography of the Earth' which I learned by heart," he said. "It went like this: 'The kingdom of giant reptiles, with its innumerable representatives on the land, in the sea, and in the air, was certainly the most powerful and most extensive animal kingdom during the entire existence of life on the Earth, but it also had a most tragic and unexpected end. During a comparatively short period toward the end of the Mesozoic era the tyrannosaurus, stegosaurus, ichthyosaurus, plesiosaurus, and all the other 'sauri' disappeared from the surface of the Earth as if wiped away by some giant storm, leaving the ground free for miniature mammals that had awaited this opportunity for more than 100 million years.'"

* * * * *

Malherne paused, reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out the half packet of cigarettes he had been hoarding. He offered them to Zor Ala, and when the other refused, he lit one and inhaled gratefully.

"Then, in conclusion," Malherne continued, "Gamow says that the causes leading to the elimination of all the dinosaurs in a very short period of time are obscure. There are many hypotheses which have been advanced by various scientists to account for it. One theory was that the rising of general ground levels destroyed the inland seas and marshes. But that wouldn't have had any effect on the dinosaurs who had already fully adapted to dry land. Neither would it affect those reptiles who inhabited the oceans. So the whole episode has remained one vast mystery, without much chance of solution."

Zor Ala nodded. "Even in my time we still didn't know," he said. "We had theories that perhaps the tiny mammals of the later Mesozoic were eating the eggs of the dinosaurs to an extent which brought about their eventual extinction. There was also the theory of 'dilution of genetic stock' in a very old race of any life form. That is, through millions of years of reproduction, the hereditary stock of any race eventually becomes so diluted that the cells become 'tired' of dividing. As a result, reproduction dwindles away, and the race dies out. But even that doesn't satisfactorily explain the geologically sudden death of the dinosaurs."

"Apparently quite a parallel to what must have happened to the Kralons," Malherne observed. "How is it that we don't find clear paleontological evidence of the existence of the Kralons?"

"No calcareous skeletal structure," returned Zor Ala. "They have only a chitinous exoskeleton. Also, you must remember that the dinosaurs held sway for almost 100 million years, and invaded almost every part of the world. In all that time, with the animals existing by the billions in almost every clime, there were naturally a few 'saurs' who fell into asphalt pits or other unusual environments where their bones were preserved for us.

"That is not true of the Kralons, for they seem to have suddenly appeared as the first insect type, sometime during the latter half of the Carboniferous Period, and existed as a race for only a few million years.

"Furthermore, their distribution is apparently very limited. From what they have told me, there are only a few dozen community hives or nations like this one. Thus it is not at all surprising that such an extremely restricted species, possessing no calceous skeletal structure, left no paleontological evidence."

Malherne considered this thoughtfully. "Then you believe that the insect types of the future are degenerated descendants of the Kralons?" he asked.

"Undoubtedly," returned Zor Ala. "But without the size or the logical reasoning ability of the Kralons. You see, insects apparently arose suddenly during the Carboniferous Period, without any prior evidence of existence in the ages preceding. They seem to be an offshoot from the main line of evolutionary development, and their sudden appearance in geologic history is without precedence in the development of life forms."

Malherne was nodding eagerly. "In connection with that, why is it that an insect goes along in its development, just like a common worm, until it reaches a certain size and age. Then it builds itself a cocoon or chrysalis, becomes a pupa, and starts a sort of 'prenatal' development all over again, but this time emerging as a full-fledged insect? Seems like they've been given a second crack at development which the other forms of life didn't get."

"That is substantially correct," agreed Zor Ala. "And we of the future have suspected that a higher type of life from somewhere has intervened in the development of life on Earth, and has experimentally given a boost to one branch of Earth-life by showing it how to re-encyst in a secondary 'egg' as a pupa, and thus continue its progress toward a higher evolutionary form before it finally emerges as an adult type."

"Whew!" Malherne ejaculated. "Whoever or whatever did that must really have been supermen!"

Zor Ala smiled. "At least," he agreed.

Malherne was struck with a sudden inspiration. "Look, would it be possible that the Kralons had something to do with the disappearance of the Dinosaurs during the latter part of the Mesozoic?--I understand, of course," he added hastily, "that this period where we find ourselves is around 100 million years before the time when the dinosaurs met their Waterloo. However, isn't it possible that descendants of the Kralons could have retained sufficient intellectual development to have been a serious threat to the existence of the 'saurs'?"

Zor Ala shook his head. "I'm afraid your theory won't stand up," he said. "For the Kralon race apparently only existed for a few million years, disappearing from the surface of the Earth around the end of the Carboniferous period.

"Thus the Kralons must have died out very nearly 100 million years before the dinosaurs' catastrophe, and the giant insects were apparently supplanted by only small, unintelligent prototypes without their size or intellectual vigor. No, there is almost certainly some other reason for the disappearance of the huge reptiles."

Malherne came to his feet suddenly. "Here I am discussing fantastic and fanciful theories, when four of my companions are somewhere in that hive of monsters! I've got to help them!"

"Calm down," Zor Ala soothed. "You would do them far more harm than good, now that the Kralons are watching for you. The best thing to do is to stay here and let them work out their own salvation as best they can. I know it sounds rather calloused, but any interference on your part now will certainly not be helpful."

"But I can't just sit here!" objected Malherne.

Zor Ala nodded. "I know how you feel," he said. "But you can do your friends far more good alive than--"

He left the sentence unfinished. Then, as if he had been considering something, he continued: "You're an engineer, Malherne, and I think it's time for you to have a talk with Gordo Lanson concerning an idea we have in mind. How do you feel by now?"

"A little creaky," said Malherne, rising and stretching painfully. "But let's get started."