Raymond Jones - Renegades of Time

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2024-12-20 0 0 653.32KB 158 页 5.9玖币
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Renegades of Time by
Raymond F. Jones
I
Joe Simmons was lying on his back in a puddle of rainwater.
His vision of the sky was limited by tiers of foliage that ranged
up and beyond any tree height he had ever known. Beyond his
feet a monstrous, twisted palm tree seemed to rise forever. Its
sharp sword fronds mingled with branches of adjacent trees that
bore leaves of red and silver. These spread in massive sheets to
the sky, and occasionally, when their load of rainwater was more
than they could bear, they twisted gently and dumped gallons of
water with an enormous splash from their hundred-foot heights.
He raised on his elbows and turned his head to try to bring
some familiar object within his vision. There was nothing. The
rain itself had a sharp sting that felt as if it were on the edge of
ice, but the air and the trees were tropical.
A moment ago he had been on Huntington's Hill, outside the
little college town of Midland. Bill Bradley was there. It was
snowing. Bill was screaming, "Get back! Get off the Hill! You'll
kill us both, you fool!"
And now he was here.
There was no accounting for the change in the landscape, and
he didn't try. He remained still and repeated his own name over
and over again. "I am Joe Simmons. I spent two years of jungle
hell in the Army. Now I live in Midland and go to Midland
College. I'm trying to see a crazy guy named Bill
Bradley to get some papers for tomorrow's class in Kinematics
of Machines."
He touched the water of the puddle in which he lay. It was
wet, but colder than rainwater ought to be in this jungle. He
inventoried his fingers and his arms and legs. He felt the wet
coat and shirt and pants he wore. They were the clothes he had
put on that morning.
He shut his eyes and tried to relax. He was obviously
experiencing some sort of temporary mental condition, which
would soon pass. He rnust have fallen and struck his head,
causing some kind of regression. That seemed to make sense.
The jungle surroundings were like those he had seen many times
in the Army. Trees. Water. Mud. Humidity.
Not quite.
The differences were enough to tell him this scene was stirred
up by a damaged mind. In a moment, however, he would be all
right, he told himself.
It had been only a short time ago, not more than a couple of
hours at the, most, when he and Bill had their collision on the
campus of the College. It had been snowing after an ice storm.
Everybody was creeping along, half blind. Joe had been running
scornful of the hazards. It would have been all right if Bill
Bradley hadn't crept blindly into an intersection of the walks.
They collided. Their briefcases broke open and spilled books
and papers for a dozen feet over the snowbanks and walks. For
twenty minutes they scrabbled in fury to retrieve their
belongings. Papers that weren't their own they thrust at one
another in anger. Finally, with everything gathered up, they
retreated into the snowstorm in opposite directions without a
glance at the other.
The spilled contents included Joe's final paper for his
Kinematics of Machines class which would deter-mine his grade
and which was due tomorrow. He dried the soaked papers over
the floor vent of the heater in his room and recognized with a
sickness in his belly that four of the most critical sheets were
missing. And a half dozen of Bill Bradley's papers were still
mixed with his.
It would be impossible to duplicate the mathematical work on
the missing sheets that night, and there was no other copy of the
work. He had an impulse to rip the offending papers belonging
to Bill Bradley. But he needed them for ransom of his own sheets.
He didn't know how to locate Bill Bradley. The sheets
themselves gave no clue. What he read on them made no sense.
There were references to weird names such as Choral, Venata,
Susselein, and Tamarina. It looked as if Bill Bradley had been
writing fantasy stuff for an English assignment.
Joe remembered, however, seeing some reference to Bill
Bradley in connection with an obscure science fraternity, one of
those where the members speak only to each other. He located
the president, who told Joe that Bill lived with his aunt and uncle
at the old Huntington place nearly ten miles out of town. And he
had no phone.
There was no solution except to crank up the ancient Chevy
Joe had bought from one of the original Forty Thieves when he
got out of the Army and make his way out to the old Huntington
place.
There, the uncle told Joe that Bill was up on top of the little
rise known as Huntington's Hill. Alone in the snowstorm on the
Hill, Bill was bareheaded and in shirtsleeves. The whole top of
the Hill seemed faintly illuminated by a ghostly, silvery column of
light. And Joe had the impression that, somehow, it wasn't
snowing where Bill was.
Bill Bradley stood perfectly motionless, his feet spread apart
and his face upturned to the sky with expectancy. Then he saw
Joe Simmons. An expression of mixed rage and horror exploded
on his face. He flung an arm in Joe's direction. "Get back! Get
back, you fool!" Then he looked up once more and gestured
frantically to the cloud-covered sky. "Normalize time!
Normalize—! Interference—interference—!"
Joe stopped, watching the frantic gestures and hearing the
words of Bill Bradley. Joe was now hi an area entirely free of
snow. When he looked up at the sky overhead he could see flakes
that seemed to vanish as they came near the Hill. He felt himself
bathed in a column of warm, silvery light.
But the desperation in Bill's voice convinced Joe there was
danger. He hesitated, then backed a dozen steps. Near the edge
of the snow-free circle he turned and started to run.
It was like hitting a brick wall. There was nothing there but
the edge of the column of light, yet he was hurled back and
thrown to the ground. He was conscious of a moan of despair
from where he had last seen Bill Bradley. He twisted to look In
that direction.
That was when he saw the giant twisted palm and felt the
stinging cold raindrops of the alien jungle. A place—a world—he
had never seen before.
He heard the voice then. He afterwards thought it like the
voice of angels. But it was uttering a stream of vituperation that
would have had to be an angel swearing.
He opened his eyes again to this unlikelihood and stirred in
the shallow puddle. Twenty feet away a girl stood watching and
reviling him in that golden voice.
He didn't catch all she said. She seemed to be using a dozen
languages, most of them unknown to him. But he caught,
"idiot—fool—stumbling jackas*, —empty-headed clod—" and
references to ancestry that are common in any language. That
was his introduction to Tamarina. He didn't know then who she
was, of course. She was simply a bedraggled spitfire standing in
the rain, her presence in that setting as mysterious to him as his
own.
She was dressed in clothing that had a touch of the unknown,
yet it was not too different from that seen on the streets and in
the classrooms of Midland. Her tiny brown skirt looked like fine
leather, but was probably some plastic. Calf-length boots were
quite suitable for the sludge she waded through to approach Joe
Simmons. Her soaked blouse could have been of any place or
fashion.
Her blonde hair was long and fine and was normally filled
with golden light, Joe was sure. Now it was wet and straggly, and
the girl looked much like a drenched kitten Joe had once pulled
out of the creek when he was a kid.
He coudn't help smiling. He didn't know who the girl was or
where the two of them were, or what had brought him there. But
he felt sure it was no illusion now, and it was a delight to hear
the girl swear in the seventeen different languages she seemed all
mixed up in.
Joe grabbed a branch projecting over the puddle and jerked
to his feet. Still woozy, he managed to stay upright. He discarded
the soaked car coat he wore. The soggy mass was wholly
unnecessary in the warm rain.
"Take it easy," he said to the girl. "I don't know what you're
talking about, but I don't like some of the names you're calling
me. It might help us both if you told me what you know about
where we are."
Her expression was one of contempt. "English language. From
Bill Bradley's block. He said there was interference. I suppose you
are it. For making a mess of things your performance is a
beautiful, roaring success."
Joe took a step toward her, feeling less wobbly now. "If there's
anything I did to deliver us here it was purely accidental. Now
tell me who you are, and what you know about this place—and,
most important, what you know about getting us out of here."
Joe touched her arm above the elbow, intending to be firm
and show her who was boss in this place and to shut off the
storm of abuse she was still throwing at him. His muscles
weren't exactly feeble after his stint of Army service, but the girl
shook free of his grip with judo ease. He stood back, awed by the
strength he had felt in her.
"Don't touch me again!" she warned. "As for where we are, I
know nothing more about it than you do. But your bungling
stupidity is responsible for us being here."
He let the accusation drop. "Are you a friend of Bill Bradley?"
Joe asked.
The girl frowned, as if the word was outside her vocabulary.
"Friend? Bill Bradley? Yes—friend—I suppose you could say so.
You may say I am a friend of Bill Bradley."
There seemed to be a gap in their mental processes, as if she
were not only unfamiliar with the English.lan-guage, but that her
basic concepts were enormously different.
Like "friend." Joe was certain she didn't understand the word
at all.
"Tell me your name," he said.
"You may call me Tamarina."
His memory jogged. He felt a chill shock of recognition.
Tamarina. That was one of the weird names he had read in Bill's
papers. He tried to remember another.
"Who is Susselein?" he demanded abruptly.
The girl reacted with a tensing of her body. "Who told you
about Susselein? Not Bill—"
He shrugged and felt a sense of minor triumph— for no good
reason. But he had at least thrown her off balance.
"I'm Joe Simmons," he said. "Joe, to my friends."
The girl seemed willing to forget his mention of the other
name, as if it were something forbidden. She looked puzzled now.
"Am I one of your friends?"
Joe couldn't help laughing, and this seemed to anger her. He
quickly sobered. "Yes," he said. "Let us say you are my friend."
And suddenly he thought, 'We'll be much more than friends.
This is no illusion. This is reality that wDl shape all future
reality.'
"We may never leave here," Tamarina said. "We may spend all
the rest of our lives here. She walked a little way from Joe and
glanced up through the branches of the enormous trees of the
rain forest and shook her head with an attitude of resignation.
"But we will try to get away."
Joe still felt mentally numb from shock of his sudden plunge
into these strange surroundings and his lack of understanding of
where he was. "How did we get here?" he demanded.
"You created—or, rather, became—an interference in the
temporal channel. But you wouldn't understand any of that. Ask
your friend, Bill Bradley —if you ever see him again," she added
bitterly. She started walking away. After a moment Joe slogged
through the swampy underfooting after her.
"You're right," Joe said when he caught up with her. "I don't
understand any of this. How about trying to answer this
question: Where are we?"
She laughed now for the first time. "That's easy! In your
language you say: 'Your guess is as good as mine.' Your guess is
as good as mine. I don't know where we are. Not the foggiest, the
faintest notion."
Joe stopped. The rain pelted the leaves of the dense growth on
all sides with a flat, spattering sound. Somewhere, at an
enormous distance, there was the sound of the cry of some great
animal.
Tamarina had continued walking, and now she turned back
with an expression of irritation at Joe's stupidity in not following
her. He looked at her across the distance between them. The rain
slapping on the leaves, the strange forest growth about them, the
wet golden-haired girl who didn't know what the word "friend"
meant—then he asked the question he had been afraid to ask.
"Is this somewhere on Earth?"
"That's one thing I am sure of. We are certainly not on your
Earth."
"The Solar System?"
"Do any of your planets resemble this?"
He let it go. "Then where?" he said.
"I told you I don't know! A light year—a thousand light
years—an infinity of light years' from Earth. Who can tell? What
does it matter? More important is: When?"
"When?" he asked stupidly.
"When, yes. How much temporal displacement is there
between your intrusion and our arrival here?"
"I don't understand," Joe said weakly. "Wasn't it a matter of
seconds between the time I fell on the Hill and my appearance
here?" He felt of his face uncertainly. His beard—or lack of
it—was the same. He hadn't arrived suddenly with a Rip Van
Winkle appearance.
"No, you don't understand. You don't understand anything.
Try to understand this: We are lost. Completely and totally lost. I
doubt that anyone has our coordinates. Our only hope is beacon
scanning. Perhaps they can find us that way. And you are
responsible. You—Joe Simmons—you put us into this
predicament. You are the one wholly responsible for our being
utterly lost in time and in space. Can you understand that?"
She turned and marched furiously through the rain forest. Joe
stood with her words echoing in his skull —which seemed at the
moment empty of everything else.
Lost.
Not only in space, but in time.
She was right: He understood none of it.
The girl had disappeared into the depths of the forest while
Joe pondered her words. He smashed through the dense foliage
in the direction she had gone. The gloom of the wet growth
became thicker and darker as he penetrated. It seemed
impossible that Tamarina had come this way. He had lived for
six months in the jungles and he was sure there was no way
through here without a machete.
He decided to turn back, and at that moment Tamarina's
contemptuous voice came from his left. "What are you doing? I
thought you were with me. Come this way."
When he turned to look in the direction from which her voice
came he saw a narrow opening between air roots as thick as
sewer pipes. He couldn't see Tamarina yet, but he crawled
through the space and glimpsed her form dimly ahead. She
moved on rapidly as if challenging him to keep up with her.
After an hour or more, they emerged into a clearing. Clear,
that is, except for waist-high grass that was thick leaved and
dense.
And wet. It swished and clung like strips of wet •
sheeting as they waded through. Beyond it, a mile or two
away, was the ocean. An ocean that wasn't blue or green, like the
waters Joe Simmons knew. It was a muddy brown, like the clay
of jungle deltas. And the whitecaps and the breakers on the rocky
beach were not white at all. They were almost blood red.
Tamarina moved ahead once more. Joe could scarcely see her
above the tall grass, except for the moving swath she made
through it. Finally, she waited for him, contemptuous
amusement in her eyes as he caught up with her once more.
"Where are we going?" he demanded. "What's the use of
wallowing through this stuff? I had enough of that in the Army.
We ought to go back to the edge of the forest and set up a shelter
to wait out this rain."
She glanced at the dense sky. "Worlds such as this are
common. I suspect we would die of old age, waiting for the rain
to stop."
Her words smashed him again with the unreality of their
situation. "Worlds like this? You talk as if you visit different
worlds every week! Who are you?"
"There is not time to explain to you." Her voice now was not
quite so irritable. She seemed almost anxious to make up for
some of her earlier wrath. Joe sensed that their experience was
not unfamiliar to her. She was not frightened and not dismayed.
She had a goal in mind.
"I need a flat area," she said, "free of growth and as large as
possible. I think the beach by the water may be suitable. Let us
hurry, please."
She resumed her urgent march through the high, clinging
grass before Joe could ask why there was need of the beach. It
was more than the mile or two he had originally guessed. The
light was deceptive, and it was more like five miles before they
broke out of the grass, exhausted from fighting it.
Tamarina dropped to the cold sand of the brownish sea, her
body heaving with the efforts of the long exertion. After a long
time, when she had regained her breath, she stirred and rose "to
her elbows. She regarded Joe, who sat with his back against a
nearby rock, watching her. She smiled in a way he would never
forget, a smile that relaxed the barrier she kept about herself.
"Joe Simmons—I think I would like to be your friend," she
said.
II
She carried a belt at her waist, which Joe had paid little
attention to. The belt bore little packets, closed by snap
fasteners. Tamarina opened one of these and removed eight
crimson, glowing cubes. The moment they were free of the
container they seemed to burst into radiant fire so intense Joe
could no longer look at them.
Tamarina shielded her eyes and walked up the beach. She
paused and laid one of the cubes carefully on the sand, then
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ScannedbyHighroller.ProofedbyMadeprettierbyuseofEBookDesignGroupStylesheet.RenegadesofTimebyRaymondF.JonesIJoeSimmonswaslyingonhisbackinapuddleofrainwater.Hisvisionoftheskywaslimitedbytiersoffoliagethatrangedupandbeyondanytreeheighthehadeverknown.Beyondhisfeetamonstrous,twistedpalmtreeseemedtorisefo...

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