Andre Norton - Crosstime 1 - Quest Crosstime

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Quest Crosstime by Andre

Norton

I

The land bepelled. Not because of any raw breakage, for the rocky

waste was contoured by wind and storm, the wind and water of passing

centuries. But those gray, red-brown, lime-white strata were only that:

bare stone. And their colors were muted, somber. Even the sea waves,

washing with constant booming force at the foot of the cliff, were a steely

shade today under the massing clouds of another storm. It was a world

completely alienated from the present struggle centered in a cluster of

green hemispheres in the river valley below; a world which had had no

dealing with humankind, nor with animals, nor birds, nor reptiles, nor

even the simplest forms of celled life such as might float in the water. For

this was a world in which no spore of life had ever dwelt—sterile

rock—until man, with his restless drive for change, had chosen to trouble

its austerity.

The storm now gathering would be a bad one. Marfy Rogan looked up

at the piling clouds, assessed the growing twilight they brought. She was a

fool to linger here. Still… She did not get to her feet. Instead, she leaned

forward in the niche she had found, rested her forehead on the crook of

her arm, pressing her shoulder against the harsh surface of the supporting

rock. Her body was tense with the effort she put into her searching probe.

In her, what had begun as a momentary uneasiness had long since grown

into a fire of fear.

"Marva!" Her lips moved soundlessly as she sent that cry, by another

method than speech, out into the vast v/ifcfercvess of this lifeless

successor world. The sea's clamor might even have drowned out a shout,

but it could not deter the call she sent mind to mind. Only—that receptive

other mind was not there!

And that silence meant a contradiction which was the root of her fear.

For among the other equipment fastened to the belt of her work suit was a

small instrument ticking serenely away, reporting that all was well, that

Marva, to whose body it was—or had been—tuned, was going about her

business in a normal way. Had been tuned…

Any change in that personality setting would indicate willful

interference. What would be the cause of such a starkly mad act?

Naturally, those on the field trip would take cover when they saw the

storm warnings and not try to return to Headquarters. But distance was

no barrier to the tie between the twin sisters, no reasonable distance. And

the 'copter was neither supplied nor prepared to make any long trek over

the unending desert of rock.

Marva's personnel disk reported all well with her, but Marfy's mind and

inner sense denied that vehemently. And of the two, she depended first

upon her own senses. Yet the disk testified against her.

Had there been anyone down in the camp other than Isin Kutur, Marfy

would have been spilling out her worries an hour ago. But he made it so

plain that he resented their arrival, that he would joyfully and speedily

seize any means that would allow him to bundle them back into the level

shuttle and be rid of them, that she had not gone down. And in that she

had been a coward. Because if what she was beginning to suspect was

true…

Marfy lifted her head. Her fine, fair hair was netted against the wind's

violence, her face now bare of all the conventional cheek- and

forehead-stenciling fashionable in her set. She closed her eyes, the better

to "see" with that other sense roving in frantic search. Delicate features, a

skin which was ivory pale, with only closely pressed lips providing color,

her face had the elegance of line that came from centuries of breeding,

tending, and cherishing. So that in her present rocky setting she was as

fantastically placed as a flower growing from the stone.

"Marva!" Her voiceless summons was a scream. But there was no

answer.

The questing fingers of the wind pulled at her. Marfy opened her eyes

just as the first spattering drops of rain hit the rocks with increasing

force. She could not descend the cliff path to camp now; she dare not set

her strength against the force of that rising gale, the drowning downpour.

In her desire to get away from observation in the camp, she had both

chosen worse and better than she had been aware of at the time: worse, in

that she must be hidden from sight below and temporarily lost as far as

they were concerned; better, in that, by squirming farther back into the

niche, she had shelter from the worst of the storm.

So, hidden in the depths of that crevice, she could no longer see the

rush of wind-lashed sea or anything else, beyond a slice of gray sky now

and then traced with the brilliance of unleashed lightning. Judging by her

past experience of these storms, she had perhaps an hour or so to remain

here.

"Marva!" She loosed a last appeal, waited with dulled and dying hope.

Marva, contrary to all "rightness," was beyond contacting. Yet the disk

said she was present, not too far away, and all was well with her.

Thus—the disk lied. And yet that, by everything Marfy had been told or

taught, was impossible!

When they had come crosstime to this Project, they had been given the

most careful briefing, indoctrinated with the need for protection devices.

And Marva—as adventurous, as impatient of control as she sometimes

was—was not ever really reckless. Nor would her sister have begun a new

adventure without Marfy; they had always acted together in any

important thing.

Also, there was no reason in the world—this world or any other of the

myriad ones open to their people—why their activities would be interfered

with to the extent of making a personnel disk lie. Why, as much as Kutur

resented them, it was to his own advantage to see they had Hundred

treatment. They were Ere Rogan's daughters, traveling with his official

permission on a carefully charted crosstime quest for knowledge.

Unless—Marfy's head jerked as a sudden thought startled her. Unless

the Limiters… She licked raindrops from her lips. Marva oftentimes

accused her of having a suspicious mind. As twin sisters they might be one

in most things, but there were basic differences of emotion, spirit,

intellect; they were individuals, not just two halves of a split whole. The

Limiters was the party behind the growing demand that crosstime travel

be placed under strict control. Supervised and controlled, of course, by

Saur To'Kekrops' proposed committee—which was the same as saying

To'Kekrops and his liege men alone. If there was an incident which could

be used for public report, proving the dangerous quality of crosstime

exploration, the need for rigid supervision; an accident to some member

of the Hundred or to the family of such a member—Marfy sucked in her

breath, went rigid. But To'Kekrops would not dare! And how could he

interfere?

There was no possible entrance into this successor world except right

down there in the midst of camp. And no possible travel vehicle except the

official shuttles. Also, the Project personnel would and did have no

sympathy with the Limiters. Their experiments here would be among the

first to be canceled under such a regimen.

Marva…

The fury of the storm was a battle over and around Marfy's small crack

of safety. She had witnessed by proxy such explosions of nature pictured

on the record tapes in the library of crosstime Headquarters. It had been

four centuries—no, five now—since her people had unlocked the gates of

Vroom's time and had gone, not backward nor forward, but across the

fabric of counted years to visit other successor worlds whose history

followed tracks varying further and further from that of Vroom. For, from

decisions made in history, sometimes even from the death of a single man,

separated worlds split, divided, and re-divided, to make a glittering web of

time roads, some so divergent that those who used them were no longer

wholly human as she and her kind defined human.

And this was one of the oddest of those alternate worlds, one in which

the first cells of life had never come into being at all: water, stone, soil,

wind, rain, sun. But nothing living or growing. Then the Project had

moved in to sow life, or attempt to do so, under controlled conditions. And

the experiment was the pride of one of the great scientific groups electing

twenty of the ruling Hundred. No, Project personnel would do nothing to

jeopardize what they were attempting to accomplish here.

Marva had been restless during the past few days. She liked people. The

thrill of crosstime travel was allied in her with a chance to study other

levels which were not barren deserts. The sisters had made two such trips,

having sworn to obey orders, and both times Marva had been

disappointed at the narrow path they had been constrained to walk. Here

they had been afforded mere freedom, simply because there were no

otherworld natives to whom they could inadvertently reveal themselves.

So— But there was no use in speculating, although Marfy's imagination

continued to supply her with a series of explanations drawn from the few

facts she knew, each perhaps a little more exotic than the one preceding it.

Only one decision for her, once the storm was over: she was going straight

to Kutur. Then she was going to demand what she had been so careful not

to request since they had arrived and had learned that Kutur's compliance

with Ere Rogan's request for their visit had been a very unwilling one: she

was going to demand a message right, and report directly to—to whom?

Ere Rogan was level-hopping, inspecting successor depots, making sure

the Limiters had no laxness of regulation, no possible excuse to enter a

"contrary" at the next conference. She might catch him in any of half a

hundred stations. But also she would have to leave calls at each, and she

dared not tie up the message lines unless it was a matter of dire

importance. The very leaving of those calls would cause comment and stir

across the whole crosstime system.

Then, to whom? Com—Com Varlt perhaps? She had known Com since

he had been an Apt-wardsman just out of training, when she and Marva

had been taken, at the age of six, to see the animals on the Forest Level.

Com Varlt's family holdings marched with Rogan's; they had

inter-familied twice in the not too-distant past. And Varlt was on home

duty this month. Yes, a message to Varlt, though they would wonder about

that, too. Unless Marva… Marfy shook her head in answer to her own

thoughts, willing away that hot, tight feeling inside that threatened to take

over her emotions whenever she thought of her sister and the unanswered

mind call. She would wait out the storm up here; the time would give her

a chance to think out just the right message for Varlt. Then, once the

worst of the wind and rain was over, she would go back to camp, face up

to Kutur, and claim her right of communication.

It was a small shuttle but compact. Not with all the latest fixtures, of

course, but well fitted for such a routine run. Blake Walker glanced about

the small cabin. Two cushioned and shielded seats were in place before the

control board; behind them, the lockers of emergency supplies, recording

equipment, tools. It was as safe a method of crosstime travel as the

experts—and they were expert—had been able to devise to date. A

satisfactory standing at his passout from instruction into the corps

allowed him to make this routine run alone.

In a package wedged behind his seat was the ostensible reason for his

trip: special scientific equipment to be delivered to a project attempting

to seed life on a sterile world. His other mission had been delivered orally

by Master Wardsman Com Varlt: to check on the Rogan twins.

Not too long ago, before the Limiters had become so vocal—and why

had their reactionary party become suddenly so important, backed by a

huge increase in membership?—crosstime travel had provided holidaying

for responsible parties, field trips for students, and the usual business of

traders. But there had been a cutback in permits when the Limiters began

fulminating opposition. Now word had come down the line with

emphasis: no more pleasure travel save to "empty" forest worlds, nothing

to cause incidents. And that had not been too smart a move, for it played

into To'Kekrops' hands in the other direction. He now demanded why, if

crosstiming was so safe, did they refuse permits? Rogan had fought the

cutback in outgo permissions, had declared it the wrong answer to

To'Kekrops' insinuations, and, to prove that, had pointedly defied the

order, sending his daughters on a student permission to the Project. He

had had to answer one Question for that, but he had stuck to his beliefs,

and was using his position to reinstate the normal traffic.

Blake wriggled against the protecting cushions of his seat. He had

worked out his own travel code and had it checked. Now he proceeded to

put the pattern into action on the board. Even veteran master wardsmen

were never hasty about coding, and the requirement of making three

checks before the pattern was loosed did not make any shuttle pilot

impatient. A fraction of an inch either way might not only land him on the

wrong level, but might also mean death because the shuttle might well

materialize in a position of space already firmly occupied by some massive

solid object.

So Blake took his time, made three checks before playing out the

pattern on the hand keys. There was a whir, the sickening lurch to break

free from stable time on Vroom's level and go voyaging across the worlds

of alternate destinies.

Sealed in the cabin, Blake caught no glimpse of those worlds, not even

as shadows flowing about him, although the first time he had so traveled,

on the secret shuttle of a level-hopping criminal, he had seen them gather,

break, reform, change beyond the bare rim of the platform on which he

had huddled. He himself had come out of one of those other worlds,

caught up, through no will of his own but because' of a psi gift, in the

affairs of Com Varlt's team of man hunters. They had played out a wild

game then, and in the end the team had had no choice but to take Blake

on to Vroom, since his defensive inborn mind-block made false memory

grafting impossible.

A stranger in his own world, where he had been found as a baby in an

alley and fostered by those who had died before he was fully grown, Blake

accepted Vroom's friendship and the offer of a career as wardsman. And

he knew that, though it had never been fully proved, Com Varlt believed

that he, Blake, came from yet another level, one close to Vroom and on the

verge of discovering crosstiming itself when a chain atomic reaction had

destroyed it utterly. Was he the only survivor of that world? Had he been

the child of some experimenter there who had seen a slim chance of

survival for his son by putting him through a yet untested "door"?

Perhaps. But his possible parentage was no longer of any consequence to

Blake. He was well content with what Vroom had to offer, and secretly

more than satisfied with the chance to make this solo run.

Once set up and in progress, the code pattern acted independently of

the shuttle's pilot. He had a little more than an hour, if time was to be

reckoned under such circumstances. But speculation on that point did not

bother Blake.

No wardsman wore uniform save for ceremonial occasions at Vroom.

You might possess the short maroon jacket, the tight-fitting breeches,

metal-latched boots for all your days of service in the corps and perhaps

appear only three or four times with those articles of dress on your back

and body. Blake's lean, six-foot frame was clothed now in the same drab

coveralls as he would find the Project men wearing when the shuttle

reached his destination. Above this monotone of color, his brown skin, a

smooth brown which was its natural pigment rather than any tan, seemed

even darker. Sharp in contrast, in the bright interior light of the shuttle

cabin, was his hair, a dark red. He wore the equipment belt of an explorer,

its various gadgets for defense or survival use. And around his neck the

corps identification tag slipped, cool against his flesh, as he moved.

He had made three runs since he passed out of instruction, all as the

least important member of temporary crews on routine missions. And he

had yet to serve as a "passer" or part of a contact crew more or less

permanently in residence on any foreign level. Sometimes such a stint

called for plastic surgery and study techniques that altered the team

beyond the point of any return, so its members had to pass through a

reversal of procedure when their tour of duty was finished. But one had to

be at least two steps higher in rank and well tested before one could

qualify for that. Also, one had to be really "talented." All the fabled psi

gifts of his native level were known to the wardsmen, some of whom

possessed two or even more. Levitation, telepathy, telekinesis,

precognition—Blake had seen them all in action and also in testing. But

compared with most of his fellow corpsmen in service or training, he had

but meager natural equipment.

His two "talents," if so they might be termed, were precognition of

danger, which he had experienced all his life —in the past to his uneasy

concern—and another which he had not known he possessed until he had

met the wardsmen during their hunt for the escaped criminal. But in this

second talent Blake was not only the equal of his new companions—he was

their superior. For without willing it or training, he had developed a mind

block to the degree that no one he had yet met—and in the course of

training he had been confronted with the best his commanding officers

could throw at him—might influence his thinking or read his thoughts. In

a telepathic society he possessed a natural defense better than any

perfected by mechanical means.

Blake had tried to develop other talents, hoping that esper powers

might be latent. But his most rigorous struggles had ended in failure. It

was the lack of these talents that might keep him grounded when it came

to regular crosstime missions. Like the ache of a long-suffered wound,

suppressed but ever there, that thought lay at the back of Blake's mind.

However, there would be no call for esper talents at the Project. He

would deliver this package, observe the situation as far as the Rogan girls

were concerned, and be on his way back in a matter of hours. A dull task

all around. Next tour ought to be Forest Level and that was better. A world

without men, where animals were free and without fear, the Forest Level

was a favorite with children and family groups for camping. Three

wardsmen accompanied each so-arranged tour and all protective "waves"

were always on. So far no protest from the Limiters for a close-down there

had been voiced. Forest World was too popular. To'Kekrops' party would

risk a vast amount of adverse reaction if they tried making that level out of

bounds.

Light flashed on his board. Blake's hand hovered over the key as he

counted up to ten and then down again, giving the double amount of time

to assure himself complete arrival. Then he flicked the hatch release. The

shuttle ceased to quiver, a portion of the wall moved, and Blake looked out

into the faintly bluish light of the level terminal.

Blake blinked as he recognized the man facing him— Tursha Scylias,

second-in-command of the whole Project. Whatever he transported must

be more important than he had been informed. He pulled the package out

of its tight fittings, lifting it with the care he supposed it deserved.

But Scylias accepted the burden almost absently, continuing to eye

Blake.

"You are new." Not a question but a flat statement.

"On this run, yes," Blake answered, refusing to admit to this man how

new he was. Because there was: a metallic taste in his mouth, a prickle of

roughening skin between his shoulders. Trouble! Here—or very close! He

was alerted by his talent, and instantly, in only half-conscious effort, his

mind shield went up. This much he had learned under tuition, to maintain

before that shield a defense of camouflage surface thought. And, in times

of stress, a second and deeper layer would deceive all but the expert into

thinking he was not shielded at all.

Now he stepped from the hatch, his boots stamping on the undisguised

rock that formed the floor of the camp structure, wishing he had some

telepathic power to pick up from Scylias a hint of what the trouble was.

"Reports." The assistant Project leader whipped out two rolls of tape in

a carrying case. He made no move to step out of Blake's way; it was as if

he had to keep a tight hold on himself to avoid herding the wardsman

straight back into the machine. Then perhaps he himself recognized that

suspicious attitude, for he did not demur when Blake set the record case

within the hatch and turned once more to his greeter.

"Everything satisfactory?" Blake fell back on the official report terms.

"Entirely so," Scylias replied and then added harshly, "You will eat with

us? It is the mid hour."

"Good enough. Thank you. I'll just check the message station…"

Scylias moved as if to block Blake's movement toward the outward

entrance of the terminal and to guide it instead to the tunnel connecting

that room with other parts of the camp.

"Storming out." His tone was flat. "You cannot reach the rods until that

is over."

Trouble… trouble… The pulse was beating heavily behind Blake's eyes

now. Not the storm, no, but perhaps the rods… But why? No sane project

leader or member would allow any trouble with the rods! To be cut off

with no chance of getting a message through. They could not want that.

But what was wrong with Scylias? The man was definitely on edge. And

there was danger here—bad— from the way Blake felt now.

II

Perhaps because there was no vegetation to act as wind breaks, the

storm seemed to have more force than on a normal world. Blake stared out

of a viewport at the rush of wind-driven rain striking against the camp

shelters. They were located in a valley, the only break between cliff walls

for a long stretch of territory. Blake need only turn his head to see the map

of the Project set out on the curving wall. The valley was cut by an

unusually slow-flowing river which formed a small delta of silt at its sea

mouth. And the sea itself was provided with a breakwater of curving reef,

turning the river-mouth coast into a partly sheltered bay.

Along the nearer bank of the river were the growth tanks, carefully

sown and now housing the algae and other primitive life imported from

the Vroom laboratories. This was only the beginning of the Project, but

Blake knew that a fantastic amount of labor and capital had already gone

into it.

Crosstime travel was largely trade, discreet trade, and the real

foundation of all Vroom's economy. Trade from one successor world to

another, natural resources from underdeveloped and primitive levels,

luxuries from more sophisticated civilizations—never enough taken to

cause native comment or investigation. And if now useless levels such as

this could be harvested, then Vroom, apart from the knowledge gained in

experimentation, would be that richer and more securely buttressed

against the future.

Outside the viewport the rain was forming so thick a curtain that Blake

Andre Norton - Crosstime 1 - Quest Crosstime

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