The Edge of Forever Read online

  The Edge of Forever

  Chad Oliver

  First published in Astounding Science Fiction, December 1951.

  This copy derived from the above source.

  Semantics is a very tricky thing; cultural patterns are very tricky and misleading things. “Time of the Terror” didn’t sound like a technical term at all…

  * * *

  Dale Jonston gripped the palisade logs until his knuckles went white with strain and tiny droplets of blood began to form under his fingernails. The humid air choked his throat and a cold sweat beaded his forehead and trickled down the inside of his ETS shirt.

  Start, his tense mind whispered. Why don’t you start?

  The massed black clouds rolled over his head like a dark sea suspended in the air. Drums of thunder throbbed in the west and an electric hush charged the atmosphere. Lightning flickered in ghost-flames around the distant peaks of the Hills of the Dead.

  It was the Time of the Terror—and the Terror was coming.

  “It will be soon now,” a low voice echoed his thoughts.

  Dale Jonston jumped inwardly at the sound and then forced himself to relax. He turned around. A tall native stood there watching him, a faint smile playing across his proud face. In the murky haze the light blueness of his skin was all but invisible.

  “Good to see you, Lkani,” Dale Jonston said. “This weird weather of yours has just about got me down—you almost scared me to death creeping up on me like that! Don’t you ever make any noise?”

  “Perhaps you should tie a bell around my neck,” the native suggested. “Is not that what you do to keep track of the animals on your planet?”

  “Your sense of humor can. be a trifle… startling, Lkani.”

  Dale Jonston eyed the native thoughtfully. These people never ceased to surprise him, and he had been stationed on Rohan for two years now. The planet was referred to officially as Procyon Twelve, of course, but no one who had ever been there called it by that colorless name. When in Rome—

  “It is coming,” Lkani said quietly, pointing out into the gathering darkness. “My people have all gone from the Changing Lands—they are waiting in the hills. They will not have to wait long.”

  Dale Jonston felt his jumpy nerves begin to settle down. He shouldn’t let it get him this way, he realized. But this brooding weather did something to a man. It was like waiting for a bad hurricane back on Earth, when you sat around interminably in the still air and watched the barometer fall. It had been like this for weeks now.

  And there were the Others—the people of mystery that no man had ever seen, custodians of a civilization that spanned the far-flung stars. Somehow, in the mutter of the thunder and the clouds of darkness, he knew that they were near. Watching. Waiting—

  “You know we’d be glad to have you on the Post,” he said. “We’ve got room for fifteen or twenty, and our buildings may be able to take what’s coming better than your settlement in the hills.”

  “I will stay with my people,” Lkani said. “We have been through the Terror before—you have not.”

  “You’ve got a point there at that.”

  The motionless, dead-smelling air pressed down on them heavily. The yellow squares of light in the windows of the Post buildings looked safe and comfortable. Dale Jonston was glad that they were there.

  “You had better get inside before it comes,” Lkani said.

  “I guess I’ll have time for that, anyway,” Jonston replied.

  “It comes fast,” Lkani smiled.

  “Well, if we can be of any help to you just whistle or beat on a drum or something.”

  “If we can help you just flash us a radio signal or send up a magnite flare,” Lkani countered.

  “You win,” Dale Jonston laughed. “Sometimes I wonder just who is kidding who around here.”

  “Here it comes,” said Lkani.

  The charged air trembled and thunder blasted savagely across the plains. Great livid bolts of lightning slashed jaggedly down and tore at the crouching vegetation. The sound swelled to a shuddering roar that pounded the ears with physical force.

  “Merry Christmas to all,” Dale Jonston whispered dazedly. “And to all a—”

  He never finished. He had a split-second’s warning as a fresh wet smell hurtled in from the plains and then it hit. Rain! Rain such as no man on Earth had ever imagined—rain that slammed down in a blinding torrent, rain that thundered and pounded and choked.

  Ten years it had been pent up in a monstrous reservoir—and now the Gates of Hell were opened wide!

  He felt his feet slipping out from under him and he coughed desperately as water clogged his lungs. The rain beat at him with a million wet hammers and he knew he was going down. The ground under him was already a sea of mud.

  A strong arm came out of nowhere and supported him as he stumbled back toward shelter. He gasped and coughed and tried to wipe the blinding sky river out of his streaming eyes. He staggered into the main Post building and the door shut behind him. “Lkani!” he choked.

  He was alone—Lkani was gone.

  He leaned against the log wall, fighting to get his breath. The rain pounded down on the Post as if determined to rip it to shreds. Thunder roared as the gods went mad.

  Quite suddenly, Dale Jonston was chillingly aware that he was a long, long way from home.

  Dale Jonston paced up and down the floor of his office, puffing on his pipe and listening to the hammer of the rain on the roof. It never stopped, that rain—it ebbed and flowed with savage fury, but it never stopped. It made Earth’s mightiest cloudbursts seem like gentle drizzles and it went on forever.

  “Sit down, Dale,” said Tom Troxel. “You’re making me nervous.”

  “Sorry,” muttered Dale Jonston, seating himself behind his desk.

  “It’s only rain,” Troxel offered.

  “Sure—and the H-Bomb is only atoms.”

  “Take it easy—you can’t stop the rain and there hasn’t been any trouble yet.”

  “Yet—that’s the word I don’t like.”

  “What can happen? So it rains for six months or a year—it won’t kill anybody.”

  “Won’t it?”

  There was a splitting hiss followed by a jarring blast of thunder. The rain droned on and it was cold in the room.

  “I don’t follow you,” Troxel said.

  Dale Jonston got to his feet again and walked over to the duraglass window. He stood there and watched the rain wash across the glass like tiny breakers. That was all there was to see—the rain and the darkness.

  “Do you know what it’s like out there now?” he said quietly. “It’s been raining like this for three weeks now and no one knows for sure how long it will go on. Those lowlands have been saturated, drenched. They’re wild swamps now, filled with great white worms crawling up through the soft ground. The natives are all crowded together on the hilltops and the caves are roaring underground rivers. The natives call this the Time of the Terror and they’re not just coining phrases for the fun of it. There’s a reason—things happen.”

  “You think the natives will act up?”

  “No, they’re intelligent people and they’re better adapted to these conditions than we are. I’m not much worried about the natives.”

  “Then—”

  “You know man’s greatest enemy is not alien natives, not monsters, not the Others—but himself. Man is his own destroyer. He always has been, down through history back on Earth, out in space when he got to the planets of his own solar system, and now here. He won’t change just because he’s on a planet that belongs to another sun.”

  The rain thundered down and a cold wind whined around the little buildings of the Post. The light on Jonston’s desk threw blurred shadow
s on the log walls. Troxel shivered and lit a cigarette.

  “Yes,” Jonston went on, puffing slowly on his pipe. “I’m worried about us—us, the mighty Earthmen. I tell you, you take any group of selected spacemen, men who have been carefully conditioned and psychologically screened—you take ’em and coop them up somewhere for a year. Put pressure on them; don’t let them see a living person except themselves. They may come through O. K.—and they may not. And we’re not dealing with trained spacemen here, Tom. Intelligent workers, sure, but not trained spacemen.”

  “I’m receiving you.”

  “Take any two ordinary people—good friends, maybe—and lock them in a room for a year. Watch what happens; the growing tensions, the little arguments, the brooding hostility that develops. Multiply that by a hundred or so, toss in this infernal rain and a planet light-years away from home, complicate the situation with great worms and God only knows what else, add a few natives—”

  “And don’t forget the Others,” Troxel added with a grin.

  “I’m not forgetting them—not for a minute. They’re an unknown factor, and hence doubly dangerous. Tom, I wish you were in charge of this Post. I’d sit around with a fiendish leer on my face and concoct enough gruesome situations to make your hair stand up on end and sing the ‘Deep Space Blues’.”

  “I hear the swamp is full of dinosaurs, too.”

  Dale Jonston looked at his prematurely bald junior officer and gave up. He was glad he had a man like Troxel around. It took a lot to panic a man with a sense of humor, and Troxel was no fool. Jonston realized that Troxel was deliberately forcing him to relax, and he appreciated it. He needed to calm down, and no mistake. It wouldn’t do for the commander of the Post to blow his top at a time like this.

  He opened the bottom left-hand drawer of his plastic desk and took out a bottle and two glasses.

  “We’ll see if we can conjure up a couple of pink elephants to add to your menagerie,” he said. “Have a drink.”

  Troxel’s eyes brightened as he hitched his chair up to the desk.

  “Hm-m-m—Old Rocket Fuel,” he enthused. “That’s what Admiral Groten was drinking just before he passed away, poor man. You know what his last words were?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “He said, ”I don’t see how they can make a profit on this stuff at twenty cents a fifth.”

  “I told you that man was his own worst enemy,” Jonston said with a smile. “Jokes like that might well destroy civilization.”

  “Right you are,” Troxel agreed cheerfully. “Let’s drink our first drink to the Others.”

  Jonston raised his glass.

  “To the Others,” he said quietly.

  Outside, the great storm lashed out at the planet, churning the lowlands into swampy ooze and pelting the mountains with a driving deluge of rain. It was a chaos of thunder and lightning and wind. And, if you were of an imaginative turn of mind, you could hear, between the Post and the Hills of the Dead, the slithering of the great white worms…

  It was night on Rohan and the Post was still. Dale Jonston sat alone at his desk, listening to the monotonous hammer of the rain on the roof. There was no visible difference between night and day, but you always knew, somehow, when night had come. You felt a strange chill in your blood and your mind did odd things with the shadows on the walls.

  He permitted his tired body to relax. It had been a hard day; they were all hard. Conferences with psychologists and anthropologists—anthropologists were indispensable in space-travel, he reflected, since they were the only scientists on Earth who were trained to understand alien cultures—supervision of projected entertainments, paper work, and the thousand and one urgent little problems that were forever coming up in the management of any community. He fired up his pipe. Funny how much civilized man depended on tobacco…

  He had held up pretty well, he figured. He had been keyed up to start with and had stayed more or less at the same pitch, while the rest of the Post had grown progressively more tense as the weeks and the months dragged by. Even Troxel was showing it now—there was a report on his desk from Dr. Moreland that noted the chief psychologist’s concern over Troxel’s condition.

  All he could hear in the night silence of the Post was the sound of the thunder, the rain, and the wind—all scrambled together into a roaring awareness of the storm that never stopped. The lightning teamed up with his desk lamp to throw grotesque shadows on the log walls.

  Sometimes, the distance got you. You wouldn’t think about it for days; you might even kid yourself into thinking that you had it licked, that you were conditioned to the deeps of space. Then it would hit you—if the great double star of Procyon should happen to explode, it would take over eleven years for the light of the explosion to reach the Earth. That’s a long way to be from home—a long way from the green fields and the trout streams and the girl you hoped would be waiting…

  He sat back in his chair, puffing slowly on his pipe, eyes closed. You could never explain a planet like Rohan to the people back on Earth; it was one of those places that only the spacemen would ever know. You might show them pictures, talk to them. You could tell them that Rohan was a world where everything was adapted to a peculiar, seasonal rain cycle. Due to the pull of the double star, an odd inclination of the planet’s axis, and great quantities of the spongelike substance frondal in the upper atmosphere, it only rained once every ten years—and then it really rained.

  You could tell them of the wonderful storage roots of the plant life, and of how they cast off millions of globular seeds just before the storm. The plants were largely destroyed by the pelting rain, but the seeds floated in the black muck and germinated after the storm.

  You might describe the intelligent, blue-skinned natives of Rohan, and tell how deceptive their simple culture was from an anthropological point of view. Their economy was a standard hunting-and-gathering one, and they lived in small groups on the great plains. When the rains came, they retreated to the hilltops, where the unusual crowding and emotional tensions brought about the periodic Time of the Terror. They lived then from storage bins and small mammals which took refuge with them on the high ground and fish in the few caves which were not transformed into torrential underground rivers.

  You could tell them about how the great plains turned into abysmal swamps filled with the crawling white worms that had been dormant underground during the dry season. You could tell them all about everything—except what counted. You couldn’t tell them how it felt.

  Dale Jonston nodded sleepily, too tired to go to his room.

  Men flamed up from the Earth and fought their way to the stars for many reasons—ambition, greed, glory. But there was only one thing that kept them on a planet once they had reached it—and that was a composite reason of economics. It might not always be so but now, in the infancy of interstellar travel, that was how it was working out.

  The planet had to produce. So it was with Rohan, a planet rich in mineral substances and medicinal plants nowhere else available. The Proclamation of Equal Rights for All Intelligent Life had nipped exploitation in the bud, to man’s everlasting credit. Trade was carried on pretty much on a mutual-benefit basis, within the limits of human failings and the alien psychologies and cultures found on the far-flung worlds. The natives of Rohan were indifferent; they had their culture and were perfectly content to let the men from Earth have theirs. Earth had nothing to offer them except terrestrial civilization, and Dale Jonston often considered that to be at best a dubious blessing. He thought of Lkani, with his shrewd intelligence and quick humor. Lkani was by no stretch of the imagination an “inferior being”—indeed, Dale Jonston sometimes wondered just which race was tolerating which on Rohan…

  The storm roared on, tearing at the building. The rain poured down until you couldn’t remember a time when the sun had shone and the sky had been any other color than black. The men were getting sick of the sight of each other. They laughed too much and too loud. You’d be sitting around and
all of a sudden get an almost uncontrollable urge to sock somebody—anybody.

  And then you would remember that you were a man, and that the Others were watching.

  The Others. Who were they, what did they want? No man had ever seen them, but they were there—there in the vastnesses of space, waiting, watching. They were there in strange contacts on radar screens, there in alien artifacts found on distant worlds, there in the whispered legends that a thousand thousand primitive tribes whispered around their campfires in the sky.

  It was rather painfully obvious that man, despite his once self-centered assumptions, was not the only intelligent race in the galaxy. He was out to carry his civilization to the stars—and someone was already there! Somewhere, sometime, they must meet. And then—what?

  The best minds on Earth had wrestled with the problem and had come up with a few simple propositions which were unusual only in that they began to show the common sense of man’s maturity. One, there was already in existence a galactic civilization of a high order. Two, Earth could not hope to fight it—it must join it. Three, the men from Earth must first prove that they had finally grown up before they could expect any overtures from the Others.

  Always, down the black rocket trails between the stars, men could feel their presence. Somewhere, lost in infinity, the Others watched and judged.

  Dale Jonston got wearily to his feet and switched out the light. He walked slowly through the long halls to his room, nodding at the sentries as he passed them. The rain beat down with a terrible relentlessness and lightning hissed down on the swamps.

  Here he was, he thought—one tiny man in this outpost on the edge of forever. And something big was going to happen; he knew it positively with that subconscious sixth sense that made him a leader. Something big—something that might well change the whole future history of that strange species that the universe called man.

  It seemed as though he had hardly dropped off to sleep when Dale Jonston came to his senses with a start. He sat up in bed, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. The storm sounded wet and unpleasant outside and he was glad that he had the warmth of the Post to protect him. He glanced at the glowing dial of his watch. Four in the morning. What in the world—