Part 2

"That is, if you don't count a damaged ego and a completely wrecked peace of mind," added Blake Garnet. "Now what, for heaven's sake?"

"May as well look around," suggested Randall. "I see some kind of buildings across the field."

The others followed the Agent's gesture; saw several dozen low, domed structures squatting in even rows a few hundred yards away.

Randall started toward them, the others following cautiously. When they were within a dozen yards of the structures, a door in the first one opened and a man stepped out.

He was a magnificent figure of a man. And his splendid body was a fitting support for the god-like head, broad of brow, features finely chiseled.

"Wel-come," he said in queer blurred accents. "Wel-come to the Time Tribe."

He advanced toward them, extending his hand. "I am Zor Ala, a 40B-7 type from the 43rd Century, according to the ancient reckoning of Anno Domini. And you--?"

Randall spoke for the group, his mind fumbling for the meaning of the man's words. "We're a group of passengers who were somehow snatched from our passage through the Earth-Tube. But what--"

"Oh, yes," interrupted Zor Ala reminiscently. "That strange and useless hole through the Earth that finally collapsed around 3000 A.D. We have a number of other Earth-Tube passengers here with us. But from what period did you come?"

Randall replied wonderingly, "Why from this,--2062 A.D. of course!"

Zor Ala shook his head slowly, a strange smile on his lips. "But this is far from being 2062, my friend," he said softly. "As closely as we have been able to reckon it, we are now living in what you would call the Carboniferous Period, probably in the latter part."

He waited a moment for his words to take effect, then continued: "And that would place our present era--" He nodded at Doctor Gerard. "Yes, my friend, I see that you understand we are now, amazingly enough, living in a time which preceded our births by approximately two hundred million years!"

Doctor Gerard turned to face his companions. "Yes," he said slowly. "I had guessed at something like this. The color and brilliance of the sun, the type of grasses, and the size and shape of the flora visible over the stockade. Yes, I'd thought of this possibility, but couldn't bring myself to really believe it!"

"But our captors," interjected Randall. "What are they? How did they trap us? And what do they intend to do with us?"

"They're just what they appear to be," said Zor Ala solemnly. He looked at Randall, and his fine eyes were bleak. "They are a species of insect which has apparently progressed both in size and in intellect far beyond any other life form of this period. And unlike the insects of my time, and undoubtedly of yours, these things act through intelligent reasoning rather than through a set pattern of instincts."

"But," interrupted Doctor Gerard, "according to the theory of most Entomologists of my time, it would be impossible for an insect to attain the size of these creatures! Their bodily structure is wrong. They couldn't support their own weight. And if they could, their inefficient breathing tubes and trachea couldn't furnish their bodies with sufficient oxygen, nor remove the waste products!"

Zor Ala smiled tolerantly. "The proof of possibility is their existence," he said. "Your contemporaries' theory is obviously incorrect.

"How can one deny the possibility of huge insects without knowing the strength of materials in their supporting structure? Do the gigantic Sequoias in North America collapse because of their almost four hundred foot height, as a Balsa undoubtedly would if it attained the same size?

"Is it philosophically logical that, because insects of your day possessed an exoskeleton incapable of supporting larger creatures, that these creatures must also possess those exact characteristics? Such an argument is absurd. Evolution fits the strength of the supporting structure to the weight it must support. And naturally the means for oxygenation and elimination are likewise accommodated."

Doctor Gerard was still unconvinced, but Randall got in the next word.

"How many more of you are there?" he asked. "Have you any more companions from your own Age?"

Zor Ala shook his head. "No more from my own time, but there are more than a hundred humans from other ages," he said. "Come, they are anxious to meet the new arrivals."

He led them to a large structure which bulked in a central position, surrounded by the smaller buildings.

An oddly-assorted but unquestionably colorful group of humans greeted their entrance in a dozen different tongues. They gathered around the new arrivals with a hundred excited queries.

"A minute, my friends," Zor Ala cautioned in his queer, blurred English. "These people are come from the year 2062. They were captured during a passage through the ancient Earth-Tube by the Kralons' Time Net, just as you were dragged from your own various Ages for the Kralons' selfish plans."

In the bewildering hours that followed, the Vator companions learned the answers to some of their enigmatic experiences. But they learned also of strange and horrible things which even the more advanced of the queer colony did not understand.

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."

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.