Hunt the Space-Witch! Seven Adventures in Time and Space Read online

  “The Hammer! The Hammer!”

  The subradio brought in Millo’s puzzled words: “A one-way screen that shields you from our guns and lets you fire at our ships? Impossible!”

  “Impossible? Your seventh ship, Commander.”

  Again Duyair’s fingers touched the firing switch. Again a bolt of force leaped skyward, and again a ship’s screens dissolved under the pressure, and a ship died. Two of the eight Imperial ships now spun slowly, gutted wrecks drifting sunward.

  “This is fantastic!” Millo said. “Double the charge! Destroy them!”

  Duyair chuckled. Lightly he depressed the switch; a third ship died, and a fourth.

  “The Hammer!” the people cried. “It destroys the ships of the Empire!”

  The Hammer descended again, and the fifth ship blazed fitfully. And the sixth.

  “An unstoppable gun, Commander Millo, coupled with an impregnable planet-wide force screen. This is the Hammer of Aldryne,” Duyair said. “This we have held in reserve, waiting for the day we could use it—waiting until the time was ripe to crush the Empire!”

  He jabbed down again. Lightning flashed, and when the sky cleared, only the Imperial flagship Peerless remained still intact in the skies.

  “We surrender! We surrender!” cried Commander Millo over the subradio. “No more, Aldryne! Surrender!”

  “Surrender accepted,” Duyair said. “I order you to return to the Emperor, Millo. Tell him of what happened this day on Aldryne. Go; I spare you.”

  Commander Millo did not need any further commands. The hulking flagship blasted jets rapidly; it spun, turned over, headed outward, slinking away toward Dervonar, sole survivor of the proud Imperial fleet.

  Duyair waited until the ship was out of sight, then turned to the priests at his sides.

  “Man those radio sets,” he ordered. “News of this victory is to be relayed to every planet in the Empire. Tonight is the night we rise against Dervon!”

  He paused to swab his forehead. He grinned; the Hammer had worked, the installation had been correct. The old gun, idle all these years, had been an ideal channel for the mighty force the Hammer held.

  The screen—and the gun. It was a combination with which Duyair could rule the galaxy if he so chose. But he had no desire to found a new Empire.

  “Word from Dykran,” said a priest. “From one Bluir Marsh. He sends his congratulations and reports that three thousand worlds are striking against the Emperor tonight.”

  “Send him an acknowledgment,” Duyair said. He stepped out on the parapet once again. By now several thousand citizens had gathered there.

  “In a short while,” he said loudly, “a ship armed with the Hammer of Aldryne shall leave this planet, and since it is unstoppable, it will destroy the Imperial fleet singlehandedly. Tonight an Empire falls, and ten thousand independent worlds will take its place!”

  “Duyair!” they roared, “Hammer! Duyair! Hammer!”

  The time had come.

  Chapter Seven

  To witness the death of an Empire that had endured three thousand years is not pleasant, but to be the final Emperor of your line is agony.

  Dervon XIV sat alone in his throne room on that final night. His ministers were long since dead, dead by their own hands. The revolt had struck even here—here, at Dervonar itself!

  He eyed the map that told of the spreading of the rebellion—out of the Aldryne system into the Cluster of which it was a part, then through the Cluster like a raging blaze.

  And then across the skies.

  Dervon shook his head sadly. The Empire had been foredoomed—but that it should end this way, at this time! He realized that his own attempts to preserve it had been the mainspring of the Empire’s destruction.

  He had known of the rebellion on Dykran. A stronger Emperor might have obliterated those two worlds at once, while he had the chance. But Dervon had been devious. He had feared losing the support of the rest of the galaxy by such a terrible action. And thus he had given Aldryne time to loose its Hammer.

  Now they all rebelled, all fell away. He saw coldly and clearly that nothing he could have done would have saved the Empire. It had crumbled of its own weight, died of its own extreme age.

  Gloomily he peered at the gyrotoy in his hand. From far away came the sound of pounding, a constant reiterating boom … boom.…

  The Hammer, he thought. Coming ever closer, here on the last night of the Empire. Smiling bitterly, the dying Emperor of the dead Empire stared at the delicate patterns shaped within the gyrotoy. Sighing, he waited for the end, while the blows of the Hammer sounded ever louder, ever closer in his ears.

  Valley Beyond Time

  Chapter One

  The Valley, Sam Thornhill thought, had never looked lovelier. Drifting milky clouds hung over the two towering bare purple fangs of rock that bordered the Valley on either side and closed it off at the rear. Both suns were in the sky, the sprawling pale red one and the more distant, more intense blue; their beams mingled, casting a violet haze over tree and shrub and on the fast-flowing waters of the river that led to the barrier.

  It was late in the forenoon, and all was well. Thornhill, a slim, compactly made figure in satinfab doublet and tunic, dark blue with orange trim, felt deep content. He watched the girl and the man come toward him up the winding path from the stream, wondering who they were and what they wanted with him.

  The girl, at least, was attractive. She was dark of complexion and just short of Thornhill’s own height; she wore a snug rayon blouse and a yellow knee-length lustrol sheath. Her bare shoulders were wide and sun-darkened.

  The man was small, well set, hardly an inch over five feet tall. He was nearly bald; a maze of wrinkles furrowed his domed forehead. His eyes caught Thornhill’s attention immediately. They were very bright, quick eyes that darted here and there in rapid glittering motions—the eyes of a predatory animal, of a lizard perhaps ready to pounce.

  In the distance Thornhill caught sight of others, not all of them human. A globular Spican was visible near the stream’s edge. Then Thornhill frowned for the first time; who were they, and what business had they in his Valley?

  “Hello,” the girl said. “My name’s Marga Fallis. This is La Floquet. You just get here?”

  She glanced toward the man named La Floquet and said quietly, “He hasn’t come out of it yet, obviously. He must be brand-new.”

  “He’ll wake up soon,” La Floquet said. His voice was dark and sharp.

  “What are you two muttering?” Thornhill demanded angrily. “How did you get here?”

  “The same way you did,” the girl said, “and the sooner you admit that to yourself—”

  Hotly, Thornhill said, “I’ve always been here, damn you! This is the Valley! I’ve spent my whole life here! And I’ve never seen either of you before. Any of you. You just appeared out of nowhere, you and this little rooster and those others down by the river, and I—” He stopped, feeling a sudden wrenching shaft of doubt.

  Of course I’ve always lived here, he told himself.

  He began to quiver. He leaped abruptly forward, seeing in the smiling little man with the wisp of russet hair around his ears the enemy that had cast him forth from Eden. “Damn you, it was fine till you got here! You had to spoil it! I’ll pay you back, though.”

  Thornhill sprang at the little man viciously, thinking to knock him to the ground. But to his astonishment he was the one to recoil; La Floquet remained unbudged, still smiling, still glinting birdlike at him. Thornhill sucked in a deep breath and drove forward at La Floquet a second time. This time he was efficiently caught and held; he wriggled, but though La Floquet was a good twenty years older and a foot shorter, there was surprising strength in his wiry body. Sweat burst out on Thornhill. Finally he gave ground and dropped back.

  “Fighting is foolish,” La Floquet said tranquilly. “It accomplishes nothing. What’s your name?”

  “Sam Thornhill.”

  “Now, attend to me. What were you
doing in the moment before you first knew you were in the Valley?”

  “I’ve always been in the Valley,” Thornhill said stubbornly.

  “Think,” said the girl. “Look back. There was a time before you came to the Valley.”

  Thornhill turned away, looking upward at the mighty mountain peaks that hemmed them in, at the fast-flowing stream that wound between them and out toward the Barrier. A grazing beast wandered on the up reach of the foothill, nibbling the sharp-toothed grass. Had there ever been a someplace else, Thornhill wondered?

  No. There had always been the Valley, and here he had lived alone and at peace until that final deceptive moment of tranquility, followed by this strange unwanted invasion.

  “It usually takes several hours for the effect to wear off,” the girl said. “Then you’ll remember … the way we remember. Think. You’re from Earth, aren’t you?”

  “Earth?” Thornhill repeated dimly.

  “Green hills, spreading cities, oceans, spaceliners. Earth. No?”

  “Observe the heavy tan,” La Floquet pointed out. “He’s from Earth, but he hasn’t lived there for a while. How about Vengamon?”

  “Vengamon,” Thornhill declared, not questioningly this time. The strange syllables seemed to have meaning: a swollen yellow sun, broad plains, a growing city of colonists, a flourishing ore trade. “I know the word,” he said.

  “Was that the planet where you lived?” the girl prodded. “Vengamon?”

  “I think—” Thornhill began hesitantly. His knees felt weak. A neat pattern of life was breaking down and cascading away from him, sloughing off as if it had never been at all.

  It had never been.

  “I lived on Vengamon,” he said.

  “Good!” La Floquet cried. “The first fact has been elicited! Now to think where you were the very moment before you came here. A spaceship, perhaps? Traveling between worlds? Think, Thornhill.”

  He thought. The effort was mind-wracking, but he deliberately blotted out the memories of his life in the Valley and searched backward until—

  “I was a passenger on the liner Royal Mother Helene, bound into Vengamon from the neighboring world of Jurinalle I … had been on holiday. I was returning to my—my plantation? No, not plantation. Mine. I own mining land on Vengamon. That’s it, yes—mining land.” The light of the double suns became oppressively warm; he felt dizzy. “I remember now: The trip was an uneventful one; I was bored and dozed off a few minutes. Then I recall sensing that I was outside the ship, somehow—and—blank. Next thing, I was here in the Valley.”

  “The standard pattern,” La Floquet said. He gestured to the others down near the stream. “There are eight of us in all, including you. I arrived first—yesterday, I call it, though actually there’s been no night. The girl came after me. Then three others. You’re the third one to come today.”

  Thornhill blinked. “We’re just being picked out of nowhere and dumped here? How is it possible?”

  La Floquet shrugged. “You will be asking that question more than once before you’ve left the Valley. Come. Let’s meet the others.”

  The small man turned with an imperious gesture and retraced his steps down the path; the girl followed, and Thornhill fell in line behind her. He realized he had been standing on a ledge overlooking the river, one of the foothills of the two great mountains that formed the Valley’s boundaries.

  The air was warm, with a faint breeze stirring through it. He felt younger than his thirty-seven years, certainly; more alive, more perceptive. He caught the fragrance of the golden blossoms that lined the riverbed and saw the light sparkle of the double sunlight scattered by the water’s spray.

  He thought of glancing at his watch. The hands read 14:23. That was interesting enough. The day hand said 7 July 2671. It was still the same day, then. On 7 July 2671 he had left Jurinalle for Vengamon, and he had lunched at 11:40. That meant he had probably dozed off about noon—and unless something were wrong with his watch, only two hours had passed since then. Two hours. And yet—the memories still said, though they were fading fast now—he had spent an entire life in this Valley, unmarred by intruders until a few moments before.

  “This is Sam Thornhill,” La Floquet suddenly said. “He’s our newest arrival. He’s out of Vengamon.”

  Thornhill eyed the others curiously. There were five of them, three human, one humanoid, one nonhumanoid. The nonhumanoid, globular in its yellow-green phase just now but seeming ready to shift to its melancholy brownish-red guise, was a being of Spica. Tiny clawed feet peeked out from under the great melonlike body; dark grapes atop stalks studied Thornhill with unfathomable alien curiosity.

  The humanoid, Thornhill saw, hailed from one of the worlds of Regulus. He was keen-eyed, pale orange in color. The heavy flap of flesh swinging from his throat was the chief external alien characteristic of the being. Thornhill had met his kind before.

  Of the remaining three, one was a woman, small, plain-looking, dressed in drab gray cloth garments. There were two men: a spidery spindle-shanked sort with mild scholarly eyes and an apologetic smile and a powerfully built man of thirty or so, shirtless, scowling impatiently.

  “As you can see, it’s quite a crew,” La Floquet remarked to Thornhill. “Vellers, did you have any luck down by the barrier?”

  The big man shook his head. “I followed the main stream as far as I dared. But you get beyond that grassy bend down there and come smack against that barrier, like a wall you can’t see planted in the water.” His accent was broad and heavy; he was obviously of Earth, Thornhill thought, and not from one of the colony worlds.

  La Floquet frowned. “Did you try swimming underneath? No, of course you didn’t. Eh?”

  Vellers’ scowl grew darker. “There wasn’t any percentage in it, Floquet. I dove ten—fifteen feet, and the barrier was still like glass—smooth and clean to the touch, y’know, but strong. I didn’t aim to go any lower.”

  “All right,” La Floquet said sharply. “It doesn’t matter. Few of us could swim that deep, anyway.” He glanced at Thornhill. “You see that this lovely Valley is likely to become our home for life, don’t you?”

  “There’s no way out?”

  The small man pointed to the gleaming radiance of the barrier, which rose in a high curving arc from the water and formed a triangular wedge closing off the lower end of the Valley. “You see that thing down there. We don’t know what’s at the other end, but we’d have to climb twenty thousand feet of mountain to find out. There’s no way out of here.”

  “Do we want to get out?” asked the thin man in a shallow, petulant voice. “I was almost dead when I came here, La Floquet. Now I’m alive again. I don’t know if I’m so anxious to leave here.”

  La Floquet whirled. His eyes flashed angrily as he said, “Mr. McKay, I’m delighted to hear of your recovery. But life still waits for me outside this place, lovely as the Valley is. I don’t intend to rot away in here forever—not La Floquet!”

  McKay shook his head slowly. “I wish there were some way of stopping you from looking for a way out. I’ll die in a week if I go out of the Valley. If you escape, La Floquet, you’ll be my murderer!”

  “I just don’t understand,” Thornhill said in confusion. “If La Floquet finds a way out, what’s it to you, McKay? Why don’t you just stay here?”

  McKay smiled unhappily. “I guess you haven’t told him, then,” he said to La Floquet.

  “No. I didn’t have a chance.” La Floquet turned to Thornhill. “What this dried-up man of books is saying is that the Watcher has warned us that if one of us leaves the Valley, all the others must go.”

  “The Watcher?” Thornhill repeated.

  “It was he who brought you here. You’ll see him again. Occasionally he talks to us and tells us things. This morning he told us this: that our fates are bound together.”

  “And I ask you not to keep searching for the way out,” McKay said dolefully. “My life depends on staying in the Valley!”

  �
��And mine on getting out!” La Floquet blazed. He lunged forward and sent McKay sprawling to the ground in one furious gesture of contempt.

  McKay turned even paler and clutched at his chest as he landed. “My heart! You shouldn’t—”

  Thornhill moved forward and assisted McKay to his feet. The tall, stoop-shouldered man looked dazed and shaken, but unhurt. He drew himself together and said quietly, “Two days ago a blow like that would have killed me. And now—you see?” he asked, appealing to Thornhill. “The Valley has strange properties. I don’t want to leave. And he—he’s condemning me to die!”

  “Don’t worry so over it,” La Floquet said lightly. “You may get your wish. You may spend all your days here among the poppies.”

  Thornhill turned and looked up the mountainside toward the top. The mountain peak loomed, snow-flecked, shrouded by clinging frosty clouds; the climb would be a giant’s task. And how would they know until they had climbed it whether merely another impassable barrier lay beyond the mountain’s crest?

  “We seem to be stuck here for a while,” Thornhill said. “But it could be worse. This looks like a pleasant place to live.”

  “It is,” La Floquet said. “If you like pleasant places. They bore me. But come: Tell us something of yourself. Half an hour ago you had no past; has it come back to you yet?”

  Thornhill nodded slowly. “I was born on Earth. Studied to be a mining engineer. I did fairly well at it, and when they opened up Vengamon, I moved out there and bought a chunk of land while the prices were low. It turned out to be a good buy. I opened a mine four years ago. I’m not married. I’m a wealthy man, as wealth is figured on Vengamon. And that’s the whole story, except that I was returning home from a vacation when I was snatched off my spaceship and deposited here.”

  He took a deep breath, drawing the warm, moist air into his lungs. For the moment he sided with McKay; he was in no hurry to leave the Valley. But he could see that La Floquet, that energetic, driving little man, was bound to have his way. If there was any path leading out of the Valley, La Floquet would find it.