Donald Wollheim_as David Grinnell Read online

  GUARDIANS OF A CAPTIVE UNIVERSE

  When Warren Alton went off to a quiet rural district of upper New York state to investigate some strange news reports, he figured it would be just a new type of "flying saucer" scare—only this time people were seeing dinosaurs and flying lizards.

  But what that star reporter uncovered turned out to be more fantastic than prehistoric monsters and more incredible than UFO's. For he found himself on a news-beat that covered dozens of hitherto unknown planets, millions of miles of interstellar space, and thousands of years of time—and yet never took him outside the bounds of present-day America!

  Here is a breath-taking super-science adventure along the very EDGE OF TIME.

  Turn this book over for second complete novel

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Warren Alton

  This featured writer would travel anywhere for a scoop—even out of this world.

  Marge McElroy

  She made a world of difference to a universe!

  Dr. Enderby

  Sometimes he felt almost like God, but not always. Jack Quern

  He was a strong-arm boy with more poise than polish. The Oracle

  Though many women, she had always the same identity.

  Carter Williams

  He was a scientist who travelled farthest by lying completely still.

  EDGE OF TIME

  by

  DAVID GRINNELL

  ACE BOOKS, INC. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

  edge of time

  Copyright, 1958, by Thomas Bouregy & Co. An Ace Book, by arrangement with Thomas Bouregy & Co.

  For big E and little e, whichever, relatively, they may be. . .

  the 100th millennium

  Copyright ©, 1959, by Ace Books, Inc.

  Printed in U.S.A.

  CHAPTER ONE

  William Bassett had just returned to his tractor when the dinosaurs appeared. Properly speaking, it was not the saurians he saw first, it was the jungle. He had just climbed onto the seat of his machine, preparatory to resuming his early spring plowing, when the entire back forty of his fields just up and vanished.

  In its place was a wall of jungle, a belt of giant green growth that stretched as far as the eye could see. It was thick, lush as the most primitive primeval jungle could be. Bassett had an impression of thick greenery, not trees, but the raw violent green of tropical grass and fern grown to the height of mighty pines.

  While he stared at this amazing forest wall, two beasts emerged from it, thrusting the thick treelike stalks aside like matchsticks. The beasts were, as the farmer recalled later, at last twelve feet tall. They had long horselike heads whose jaws were lined with sharply pointed teeth. These heads crowned long necks attached to bodies that sloped back like the trunks of giant kangaroos. They were a greenish blue, with yellow eyes and vicious fangs.

  Bassett didn't examine them longer. He stepped on the gas, swung his tractor around, and headed for the house, disregarding the careful lines his plow had been making. Terrified, he dared not look back, expecting every moment to feel the breath of one of the monsters on his heck. When he reached the edge of the field, he cut his engine, jumped from the seat, and made a dash for the house.

  There he turned around and looked. But nothing was following him. There were no giant lizards. There was no wall of primitive jungle. The back forty acres were in view again, and beyond them the gently wooded stretches of the valley, with the blue-purple line of the low mountains against the early afternoon sun.

  Two boys from Cullenville, a small town about fifteen miles from Bassett's farm, started (jn a fishing expedition in the hills one Saturday morning, a week after the local newspapers had carried the story of the fanner's vision. They were not concerned with Bassett's strange experience; in fact it is quite probable they had not even heard about it. They were intent on trying to locate a small remote stream they had only vaguely heard about, which was reputed to be teeming with speckled trout. They had been up in the hills, wandering through the woods for the past three hours.

  Although located in upstate New York, the country here was not especially good for farming land; the soil was thin and poor and barely covered wide rock strata, consequently this unproductive mountainous region was wild and sparsely settled. There were a couple of old iron mines somewhere back in the hills that had last been worked during the Revolution, but now abandoned for close onto two centuries. The locality was good for hunting, and not much else. The one thing you could be sure of was that no startling or spectacular news event ever seemed to occur in this sleepy, backwater scope of country.

  But for these two boys—and later for an important segment of the population—an amazing surprise was in store. They emerged from a thick cluster of trees, clambered up a rocky slide that promised a view down and across to the next slope, the usual vista of old pines, stumps, broken rock, shale, and clumps of bushes. But what they saw this day was a long, sprawling valley, with sunlight streaming down into it; a valley that stretched endlessly on to the far horizon. The sight held them breathless, almost unable to believe their eyes.

  In this valley, perhaps a mile or more away, stood a strange city like nothing the boys had ever seen or imagined. The houses were in the shape of beehives, made of stone and mortar, and were topped with glistening conical golden roofs. The boys saw people in this city, but they were too far away to be identified, and in the outskirts, workers were busy in the fields.

  The boys stared at each other in amazement. Then, with one accord, they turned and dashed back through the woods, in search of someone to share their discovery.

  When they returned about fifteen minutes later accompanied by a deputy game warden and a fisherman they had located, there was no trace of any city to be seen. There was only the familiar valley of rock and stumps and brushy hills. When they told their wild story in the town, needless to say, it was not believed. Nevertheless, it made the local paper.

  Seated at a desk on the seventy-fourth floor of the Carlyle Publications Building, Warren Alton stared thoughtfully at a sheaf of news clipping before him. What, he wondered, was all this leading to? All around him the huge room hummed as the staff of the national picture weekly, People, worked feverishly at desks stacked high with papers and pictures to get out the next issue. But in contrast, Alton's desk was clear save for the big folder of clippings. Just as Alton himself was relaxed and thoughtful in the midst of all this disciplined hurricane of activity.

  Alton had just returned from the back mountains of Peru where he had gone for an important cover story on newly discovered Inca ruins, and which was the star feature of the current issue of the magazine.

  Alton had come into the office that morning in response to his publisher's wish to give him a new assignment. As soon as he had sent in his name, Carlyle's secretary had come out and handed him the folder. "C.B. wants you to go through this at once. Then he wants to see you at eleven sharp." It was about ten now, and Alton, having read the news stories in the folder, was thinking about them, mentally digesting the information from the clippings.

  After he'd read the story of Bassett's jungle, and the boys' valley city, he'd quickly gone through the rest of the clippings. The first thing he noticed was that all stories seemed to originate in the same general area upstate. The second thing was that they all dealt with different oddities.

  There was the clipping that almost looked like a flying saucer story, and at first Alton thought it was. But it wasn't; not at all.

  It was an account of something seen by a commercial airline pilot, co-pilot and passengers. They were in scheduled flight from Montreal to New York. Passing over a low mountainous region, about three-quarters of
the way to La Guardia, they saw something ahead of them. It was definitely not a flying saucer. It was something stranger.

  It was a group of three creatures flying through the air, one behind the other, on wide flapping wings. Each was about fifteen feet long, and their wings appeared like tremendous leathery affairs, as innocent of feathers as were their scale-covered bodies, colored brownish-red. They had small red birdlike heads with big scarlet crests. They were flying at about a hundred and eighty miles an hour, but the plane rapidly came up alongside and passed them.

  The beasts took no heed of the man-made vehicle. They flapped along, unheeding, as the pilots and passengers gawped in amazement. The three flying monsters passed into a cloud the pilot had not previously noticed, and when he looked back both cloud and monsters had vanished, and the sky was clear.

  On setting down at the airport the story had been told to reporters. The descriptions of the fourteen people who had seen the monsters tallied exactly. The observers were of varied ages, sexes, and occupations. They could not all have had hallucinations, and all at the same time. They all saw the same things.

  But there were no such things.

  Alton whistled softly to himself, when he had finished this and read through some of the signed depositions attached to the report. Something new in "unidentified flying objects" indeed! Except that everyone had clearly identified them. . . .

  There were a couple dozen such clippings, no two quite alike. Several people had seen strange animals on roads, in fields. None as spectacular as the Bassett dinosaurs but still, strange beasts had been observed where none should be.

  The population of one whole township had witnessed a volcanic eruption.

  Northern lights, the newspaper sages called that particular vision. But the townspeople doubted the explanation.

  About ten-thirty one night, just a week ago, someone in the town square had noticed a red glow in the eastern sky. He had looked and called others. There seemed to be the outline of a huge peak among the mountains. But the town knew those low, sprawling mountains. They harbored no giant Himalayan cone like this.

  It was belching red and purple gases and they could see the puffs of vermilion steam and the streams of red-hot, molten lava tumbling down its sides. They called out their friends and their families and their neighbors. About two or three hundred people watched the fantastic display.

  It had lasted about three minutes, this fantastic sight of a huge volcano in full eruption. They had seen blazing chunks of rock hurled into the ruddy sky in a gigantic fireworks display. And then they had seen the vision vanish as suddenly as it had appeared. One minute a blazing volcano; the next instant only the dark starry sky and the low line of their familiar wooded mountains.

  Everyone agreed on several points. The descriptions were the same, as were also two other factors. No one had smelled smoke, and no one had heard any thunder or explosions.

  That's why geologists, finding that even their most delicate instruments had not recorded such a phenomenon, had dismissed the story as merely an unusual visitation of the Aurora Borealis.

  Alton was inclined to agree with the scientists. He had been in the Antarctic on one of his stories and he'd seen enough of auroras to know how startling they could be. But one thing remained in his mind: the town that had watched the volcano eruption had been in the same general area as the rest of the apparitions.

  And there were other stories. All quite incredible, all sworn to be true by the various witnesses.

  Alton pushed the folder of clippings aside and sat in thought. This was a curious sort of assignment. What was Carlyle dreaming up for him now? He glanced at his wrist watch. Time to see the chief.

  C. B. Carlyle had built up his key magazine, People, until it was a rival to Luce's life and Cowles' Look. He had done this by ingenious promotion, steady drive, and an ability to guess in advance at some of the great news-breaks of the past decade. Somehow he'd made it part of the tradition of his magazine that his star reporters were on the spot before the big stories broke.

  Carlyle's offices were plush and swank, but Carlyle himself was a man who had never lost the common approach. A stocky gray-haired executive who had himself been a newspaper reporter, a distribution manager, and even an adverrising wizard, there were few things he hadn't familiarized himself with.

  Carlyle got up from his desk when Alton walked in. The short gray publisher met the tall, younger reporter half way inside the room, and grasped his hand. "Glad to see you again, Alton. That Inca story was a fine job. Got a kick out of reading it myself."

  As he turned to his desk and Alton seated himself before it, he felt a warm glow course through him. The Old Man knew that creative people like to have a good job appreciated. And it was a matter of professional pride, then, to try to do even better next time. "Thanks, Chief," he said. "I liked doing it. But what's this new business all about? I've gone through this file of clippings, but I can't see what you've got in mind."

  C.B. leaned over, took the folder from Alton's hands, and riffled quickly through it. "Outlandish stuff, isn't it?" he smiled. "But there's a story in it."

  "Oh, no doubt," said Alton composedly, "but it seems more like one for the summer silly season, rather than a presentation of serious work."

  The publisher shook his head rapidly. "Now that's where I disagree. I think there's a really big story here. Maybe it's a crackpot one. But even crackpot stories sell copies. Remember the flying saucer rage? Life probably put that story in the money brackets when they took it seriously. You'll remember they devoted several pages to it, early in the game."

  Alton nodded. C.B. went on: "As I see it, there's a new business developing here. Somewhere in these stories there's a notion that will startle all America, that will get people excited again, and give TV and newspapers a steady stream of headlines. I intend to be the first to break it. And I want you to take the next few days to work on it."

  The reporter frowned. "Just where do I start? This thing seems to be a combination of all sorts of loose ends. There's nothing one can simply latch on to, like the idea of saucers in the sky. Here we have jungles and beasts, volcanoes and strange cities, and so forth. The only clue to the story line, or angle, that we have so far is that all these stories come from one general locality."

  Carlyle leaned forward, clasping his hands on his desk. "Exacdy! And I want you to go up to that area, Cullenville and the other places where these people have been seeing things, and look around. Talk to these people; see if you can shake their stories. If you can't shake 'em, see if you can link 'em. Or explain them.

  "Maybe these folks are all drinking some sort of brew that's giving them hallucinations? Maybe some undiscovered narcotic plant, like Peyoti in the Southwest, is growing wild around there. Maybe the air's over-high in oxygen content and they're all a little ga-ga. Maybe they've got some sort of religious hysteria that gives them visions afterwards.

  "But whatever it is, there's got to be a cause!"

  "Hmmm," Alton said slowly. "Would you really like it if it turned out to be something they drank?"

  Carlyle laughed. "Naturally, that would be of interest and we'd publish the story. But it wouldn't make a new fad that we could really cash in on. Ill publish whatever you find, but I've got a hunch it's going to be something tougher to pin down than the suggestions I just threw off. I'd like to see a story that will start the rest of the country buzzing, and start some wild stories from other places. I'd like to see volcanoes pop up in Kansas and dinosaurs in Oregon. A Florida housewife spot cities in the swamps. In short, it would be nice to have another U.F.O. thing start from your article.

  "But you know People is an honest magazine, Alton. If there's a sane solution, we're not going to fake it. But personally I think that this sort of thing is going to spread, and I want the story first from the original sources."

  "Okay, chief," said Alton. "When do you want me to start?"

  The publisher smiled. "I think you'd better start at once— t
his afternoon, if possible. Take a photographer with you. You can get pictures of the places and characters in these news stories and any other stories around that didn't make the wires. Tell Gardner to assign you someone."

  Back at his desk, he called Gardner, manager of the photography department, and relayed Carlyle's instructions. He said he wanted the photographer ready to leave about one-thirty, and to meet him at his desk. Meanwhile Alton would have his lunch, pack a few things, and get his own car out of the garage. He'd drive upstate that afternoon.

  Gardner grumbled as usual. All his good men were on assignment. Carlyle was wasting talent on a fool project. Well, he'd find someone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When Warren Alton returned to the office a little before two, his three-year-old Dodge parked in the building garage, his bags—which he had never really had time to unpack— stowed away, he strode up to his desk expecting to find his photographer ready and waiting.

  There was no man near his desk, but a girl was sitting tilted back in his seat, reading a movie fan magazine. Warren's first impression was of a head of glistening black hair, and a pair of guileless green eyes as the girl looked up at his approach. The eyes widened and the mouth smiled.

  Warren stood and looked at her. "Yes?" he said. "Anything I can do for you?"

  The girl nodded. "I guess so. That is, Mr. Gardner said I'm to go with you on an assignment. You must be Warren Alton, the writer. I liked the story of yours in the latest issue. . . ."

  Alton shook his head to clear, it. "I don't understand," he said. "I was told that a photographer was supposed to meet me here."

  "Oh," she said in an untroubled voice, "that's me. I'm the photographer. See." She pointed at the floor next to the desk.