Key Out of Time

  4

  Storm Menace

  "We have to know." Ashe leaned back against the crate they had justemptied. "Something was done here--in two hundred years--and then, anempty world."

  "Pandora's box." Ross drew a hand across his forehead, smearing sweatand fine sand into a brand.

  Ashe nodded. "Maybe we run that risk, loosing all the devils of thealiens. But what if the Reds open the box first on one of theirsettlement worlds?"

  There it was again, the old thorn which prodded them into risks andrecklessness. Danger ahead on both paths. Don't risk trying to learngalactic secrets, but don't risk your enemy's learning them either. Youheld a white-hot iron in both hands in this business. And Ashe wasright, they had stumbled on something here which hinted that a wholeworld had been altered to suit some plan. Suppose the secret of thatalteration was discovered by their enemies?

  "Were the ship and castle people natives?" Ross wondered aloud.

  "Just at a guess they were, or at least settlers who had beenestablished here so long they had developed a local form of civilizationwhich was about on the level of a feudal society."

  "You mean because of the castle and the rock bombardment. But what aboutthe ships?"

  "Two separate phases of a society at war, perhaps a more progressiveagainst a less technically advanced. American warships paying a visit tothe Shogun's Japan, for example."

  Ross grinned. "Those warships didn't seem to fancy their welcome. Theysteered out to sea fast enough when the rocks began to fall."

  "Yes, but the ships could exist in the castle pattern; the pylons couldnot!"

  "Which period are you aiming for first--the castle or the pylons?"

  "Castle first, I think. Then if we can't pick up any hints, we'll takesome jumps forward until we do connect. Only we'll be under severehandicaps. If we could only plant an analyzer somewhere in the castle asa beginning."

  Ross did not show his surprise. If Ashe was talking on those terms, thenhe was intending to do more than just lurk around a little beyond thegate; he was really planning to pick up alien speech patterns,eventually assume an alien agent identity!

  "Gordon!" Karara appeared between two of the lace trees. She came sohastily that the contents of the two cups she carried slopped over. "Youmust hear what Hori has to say--"

  The tall Samoan who trailed her spoke quickly. For the first time sinceRoss had known him he was very serious, a frown line between his eyes."There is a bad storm coming. Our instruments register it."

  "How long away?" Ashe was on his feet.

  "A day ... maybe two...."

  Ross could see no change in the sky, islands, or sea. They had hadidyllic weather for the six weeks since their planeting, no sign of anysuch trouble in the Hawaikan paradise.

  "It's coming," Hori repeated.

  "The gate is half up," Ashe thought aloud, "too much of it set to bedismantled again in a hurry."

  "If it's completed," Hori wanted to know, "would it ride out a storm?"

  "It might, behind that reef where we have it based. To finish it wouldbe a fast job."

  Hori flexed his hands. "We're more brawn than brain in these matters,Gordon, but you've all our help, for what it's worth. What about theship, does it lift on schedule?"

  "Check with Rimbault about that. This storm, how will it compare to aPacific typhoon?"

  The Samoan shook his head. "How do we know? We have not yet had to facethe local variety."

  "The islands are low," Karara commented. "Winds and water could--"

  "Yes! We'd better see Rimbault about a shelter if needed."

  If the settlement had drowsed, now its inhabitants were busy. It wasdecided that they could shelter in the spaceship should the storm reachhurricane proportions, but before its coming the gate must be finished.The final fitting was left to Ashe and Ross, and the older agentfastened the last bolt when the waters beyond the reef were already windruffled, the sky darkening fast. The dolphins swam back and forth in thelagoon and with them Karara, though Ashe had twice waved her to theshore.

  There was no sunlight left, and they worked with torches. Ashe began hisinspection of the relatively simple transfer--the two upright bars, theslab of opaque material forming a doorstep between them. This was only askeleton of the gates Ross had used in the past. But continualexperimentation had produced this more easily transported installation.

  Piled in a net were several supply containers ready for an exploringrun--extra gill-packs, the analyzer, emergency rations, a medical kit,all the basics. Was Ashe going to try now? He had activated thetransfer, the rods were glowing faintly, the slab they guarded having aneerie blue glimmer. He probably only wanted to be sure it worked.

  What happened at that moment Ross could never find any adequate words todescribe, nor was he sure he could remember. The disorientation of thepass-through he had experienced before; this time he was whirled into avortex of feeling in which his body, his identity, were rift from himand he lost touch with all stability.

  Instinctively he lashed out, his reflexes more than his conscious willkeeping him above water in the wild rage of a storm-whipped sea. Thelight was gone; here was only dark and beating water. Then a lightningflash ripped wide the heavens over Ross as his head broke the surfaceand he saw, with unbelieving eyes, that he was being thrustshoreward--not to the strand of Finger Island--but against a cliff wherewater pounded an unyielding wall of rock.

  Ross comprehended that somehow he had been jerked through the gate, thathe was now fronting the land that had been somewhere beneath the heightssupporting the castle. Then he fought for his life to escape the hammerof the sea determined to crack him against the surface of the cliff.

  A rough surface loomed up before him, and he threw himself in thatdirection, embracing a rock, striving to cling through the backwash ofthe wave which had brought him there. His nails grated and broke on thestone, and then the fingers of his right hand caught in a hole, and heheld with all the strength in his gasping, beaten body. He had had nopreparation, no warning, and only the tough survival will which had beentrained and bred into him saved his life.

  As the water washed back, Ross strove to pull up farther on hisanchorage, to be above the strike of the next wave. Somehow he gained afoot before it came. The mask of the gill-pack saved him from beingsmothered in that curling torrent as he clung stubbornly, resistingagain the pull of the retreating sea.

  Inch by inch between waves he fought for footing and stable support.Then he was on the surface of the rock, out of all but the lash ofspray. He crouched there, spent and gasping. The thunder roar of thesurf, and beyond it the deeper mutter of the rage in the heavens, wasdeafening, dulling his sense as much as the ordeal through which he hadpassed. He was content to cling where he was, hardly conscious of hissurroundings.

  Sparks of light along the shore to the north at last caught Ross'sattention. They moved, some clustering along the wave line, a few strungup the cliff. And they were not part of the storm's fireworks. Menhere--why at this moment?

  Another bolt of lightning showed him the answer. On the reef fringewhich ran a tongue of land into the sea hung a ship--two ships--poundedby every hammer wave. Shipwrecks ... and those lights must mark castledwellers drawn to aid the survivors.

  Ross crawled across his rock on his hands and knees, wavered along thecliff wall until he was again faced with angry water. To drop into thatwould be a mistake. He hesitated--and now more than his own predicamentstruck home to him.

  Ashe! Ashe had been ahead of him at the time gate. If Ross had beenjerked through to this past, then somewhere in the water, on the shore,Gordon was here too! But where to find him....

  Setting his back to the cliff and holding to the rough stone, Ross gotto his feet, trying to see through the welter of foam and water. Notonly the sea poured here; now a torrential rain fell into the bargain,streaming down about him, battering his head and shoulders. A chill rainwhich made him shiver.

  He wore gill-pack, weighted belt with its sheathed too
l and knife,flippers, and the pair of swimming trunks which had been suitable forthe Hawaika he knew; but this was a different world altogether. Dare heuse his torch to see the way out of here? Ross watched the lights to thenorth, deciding they were not too unlike his own beam, and took thechance.

  Now he stood on a shelf of rock pitted with depressions, all pools. Tohis left was a drop into a boiling, whirling caldron from which pointsof stone fanged. Ross shuddered. At least he had escaped being pulledinto that!

  To his right, northward, there was another space of sea, a narrow strip,and then a second ledge. He measured the distance between that and theone on which he perched. Staying where he was would not locate Ashe.

  Ross stripped off his flippers, made them fast in his belt. Then heleaped and landed painfully, as his feet slipped and he skidded facedown on the northern ledge.

  As he sat up, rubbing a bruised and scraped knee, he saw lightsadvancing in his direction. And between them a shadow crawling fromwater to shore. Ross stumbled along the ledge hastening to reach thatfigure, who lay still now just out of the waves. Ashe?

  Ross's limping pace became a trot. But he was too late; the otherlights, two of them, had reached the shadow. A man--or at least a bodywhich was humanoid--sprawled face down. Other men, three of them,gathered over the exhausted swimmer.

  Those who held the torches were still partially in the dark, but thethird stooped to roll over their find. Ross caught the glint of light ona metallic headcovering, the glisten of wet armor of some type on thefellow's back and shoulders as he made quick examination of the sea'svictim.

  Then.... Ross halted, his eyes wide. A hand rose and fell with expertprecision. There had been a blade in that hand. Already the three wereturning away from the man so ruthlessly dispatched. Ashe? Or somesurvivor of the wrecked ships?

  Ross retreated to the end of the ledge. The narrow stream of waterdividing it from the rock where he had won ashore washed into a cave inthe cliff. Dare he try to work his way into that? Masked, with thegill-pack, he could go under surface if he were not smashed by the wavesagainst some wall.

  He glanced back. The lights were very close to the end of his ledge. Towithdraw to the second rock would mean being caught in a dead end, forhe dared not enter the whirlpool on its far side. There was really nochoice: stay and be killed, or try for the cave. Ross fastened on hisflippers and lowered his body into the narrow stream. The fact that itwas narrow and guarded on either side by the ledges tamed the waves alittle, and Ross found the tug against him not so great as he feared itwould be.

  Keeping hand-holds on the rock, he worked along, head and shouldersoften under the wash of rolling water, but winning steadily to the breakin the cliff wall. Then he was through, into a space much larger thanthe opening, water-filled but not with a wild turbulence of waves.

  Had he been sighted? Ross kept a handhold to the left of that narrowentrance, his body floating with the rise and fall of the water. Hecould make out the gleam of light without. It might be that one of thosehunters had leaned out over the runnel of the cave entrance, wasflashing his torch down into the water there.

  Behind mask plate Ross's lips writhed in the snarl of the hunted. Inhere he would have the advantage. Let one of them, or all three, try tofollow through that rock entrance and....

  But if he had been sighted at the mouth of the lair, none of histrackers appeared to wish to press the hunt. The light disappeared, andRoss was left in the dark. He counted a hundred slowly and then a secondhundred before he dared use his own torch.

  For all its slit entrance this was a good-sized hideaway he had chancedupon. And he discovered, when he ventured to release his wall hold andswim out into its middle, the bottom arose in a slope toward its rear.

  Moments later Ross pulled out of the water once more, to crouchshivering on a ledge only lapped now and then by wavelets. He had founda temporary refuge, but his good fortune did not quiet his fears. Hadthat been Ashe on the shore? And why had the swimmer been so summarilyexecuted by the men who found him?

  The ships caught on the reef, the castle on the cliff above hishead ... enemies ... ships' crews and castle men? But the callous actof the shore patrol argued a state of war carried to fanatic proportions,perhaps inter-racial conflict.

  He could not hope to explore until the storm was over. To plunge backinto the sea would not find Ashe. And to be hunted along the shore by anunknown enemy was simply asking to die without achieving any good inreturn. No, he must remain where he was for the present.

  Ross unhooked the torch from his belt and used it on this higher portionof the cave. He was perched on a ledge which protruded into the water inthe form of a wedge. At his back the wall of the cave was rough, andtrails of weed were festooned on its projections. The smell of fishydecay was strong enough to register as Ross pulled off his mask. As faras he could now see there was no exit except by sea.

  A movement in the water brought his light flashing down into the darkflood. Then a sleek head arose in the path of that ray. Not a manswimming, but one of the dolphins!

  Ross's exclamation of surprise was half gasp, half cry. The seconddolphin showed for a moment and between the shadow of their bodies, justunder the surface, moved a third form.

  "Ashe!" Ross had no idea how the dolphins had come through the timegate, but that they had guided to safety a Terran he did not doubt atall. "Ashe!"

  But it was not Ashe who came wading to the ledge where Ross waited withhand outstretched. He had been so sure of the other's identity that heblinked in complete bewilderment as his eyes met Karara's and she halfstumbled, half reeled against him.

  His arms about her shoulders steadied her, and her shivering body wasclose to his as she leaned her full weight upon him. Her hands made afeeble movement to her mask, and he pulled it off. Uncovered, her facewas pale and drawn, her eyes now closed, and her breath came in ragged,tearing sobs which shook her even more.

  "How did you get here?" Ross demanded even as he pushed her down on theledge.

  Her head moved slowly, in a weak gesture of negation.

  "I don't know ... we were close to the gate. There was a flash oflight ... then--" Her voice sealed up with a note of hysteria in it."Then ... I was here ... and Taua with me. Tino-rau came ... Ross,Ross ... there was a man swimming. He got ashore; he was getting to hisfeet and--and they killed him!"

  Ross's hold tightened; he stared into her face with fierce demand.

  "Was it Gordon?"

  She blinked, brought her hand up to her mouth, and wiped it back andforth across her chin. There was a small red trickle growing between herfingers, dripping down her arm.

  "Gordon?" She repeated it as if she had never heard the name before.

  "Yes, did they kill Gordon?"

  In his grasp she was swaying back and forth. Then, realizing he wasshaking her, Ross got himself under control.

  But a measure of understanding had come into her eyes. "No, not Gordon.Where is Gordon?"

  "You haven't seen him?" Ross persisted, knowing it was useless.

  "Not since we were at the gate." Her words were less slurred. "Weren'tyou with him?"

  "No. I was alone."

  "Ross, where are we?"

  "Better say--when are we," he replied. "We're through the gate and backin time. And we have to find Gordon!" He did not want to think of whatmight have happened out on the shore.