Time War

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

DEDICATION

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

AUTHOR’S NOTE

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 1974 by Lin Carter.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

DEDICATION

This book is for my old friend JOE SCHAUMBURGER

who loves this kind of van-Vogtian puzzle-yarn as much as I do.

CHAPTER I

The Impossible Murderer

JOHN LUX lifted his eyes from the sheaf of subelectronic specifications he had been studying, and stared directly into the muzzle of a revolver.

The expensively decorated executive suite was untenanted, save for himself. The large room was almost soundless, except for the hum of the air conditioning and the distant chatter of typewriters in the outer offices, beyond the heavy mahogany door. He blinked and looked again, too completely astonished to move, to cry out, or even to think.

In a detached manner, almost as if part of an audience watching an enactment, or an observer looking on as these things happened to someone else, he noted that the gun was a Colt .45 automatic, similar to the one that lay in the bottom drawer of his own desk.

His mind veered giddily away from the element of the impossible. Nevertheless, the gun hung there in mid-air before his desk, suspended in emptiness, without any visible support.

And that was craziness; such things did not, could not, happen!

Yet there it was.

Slanting rays of sunlight, shining through the long slats of the Venetian blinds that showed through the heavy, half-parted drapes, glittered along the blued steel of the gun barrel. It was not, could not be, an illusion; this was solid. This was real.

A moment ago he had been absorbed in his plant engineers’ report on the subelectronic guidance system for a new ICBM prototype missile the government had contracted with his firm to produce. A moment before, the world had been ordinary-prosaic—even a little dull.

Now he was thrust into a living nightmare.

The revolver did not waver in the slightest. It was as rigid as if clenched in the grip of an invisible hand!

These were the thoughts that flashed through his mind in the first half-second as he stared directly into the cold, black, unwinking eye of the pistol barrel.

Then a metallic click rang loudly through the tense stillness of the office. It was as if an invisible finger had clicked off the safety catch. As fascinated as if he were staring into the eye of a cobra, John Lux saw the trigger move ever so slightly. He knew, with the finality of utter conviction, that in the next split second a bullet would go crashing into his brain.

He knew, also, that he could never throw himself aside in time to avoid that bullet.

The room roared with the thunder of a single gunshot—

—and Lux inexplicably found himself standing in the corner of the far wall, thirty feet from his desk, braced on trembling legs, panting and soaked with sweat, as if exhausted by some athletic feat, some physical ordeal of almost superhuman effort.

The room swam about him drunkenly; he seized the back of an expensive Swedish Modern couch to steady himself until the vertigo passed. Mastering his amazement, he looked down at himself, dreading what he might find.

And found—nothing!

No blood, no wound. Neither his suit nor his shirt front bore the marks of powder burns. It was as if the entire experience had been some elaborate joke, some enormous hoax. Or as if he had only dreamed the thing, and had not really experienced it in actuality.

But this was madness! There was no doubt in his mind that what had seemed to happen had really occurred. Lux was a hard-headed man, an electronic scientist, a successful businessman, a powerful industrial magnate. He had clawed his way up from the bottom of the heap, and had reached his present pinnacle of achievement because of his unique and valuable combination of the businessman’s practicality and the scientist’s imagination. Dreams—magic and mysticism, the occult and the inexplicable—had no room in his life.

He believed in what his senses told him was hard and real, and he had only contempt for fuzzy speculation and dreamy theorizing. Now he was confronted with a situation in which his senses had reported a reality that was impossible—that must, therefore, be empty illusion! For an instant, he toyed with the seductive thought of hallucination; in the next instant, with reluctance, he rejected it.

For the gun had fired! No slightest doubt of that fact existed in his mind. The roar of the explosion still rang in his ears; the sharp stench of cordite stung his nostrils.

Swiftly, he glanced across the room to where the pistol had hung in mid-air.

But it was gone!

It had winked out of existence a fraction of a second after it had fired at him.

The faint clatter of typewriters had ceased in the room beyond. A sudden clamor or shrill, questioning voices came faintly to his ear. The door swung open and a young woman in a prim silk dress looked frantically about.

Sir? Mr. Lux! Are you all right? We heard a—

Some intuition he did not really understand bade him soothe his secretary’s alarm.

Everything is all right, Miss Forrester. A slight accident. I was cleaning my pistol—the pistol I keep in my desk—and it fired accidentally. I guess I had forgotten it was loaded.

He ushered the young woman out of his office, told her he did not wish to be disturbed, and returned to his desk. Had the whole thing been a dream of some kind? Had he dozed off momentarily, nodded over the technical report, and dreamed the entire incident?

John Lux smiled grimly, and a bit perplexedly. If so, his dreams had a remarkable power to infect others—for Miss Forrester had heard the gunshot, too! That could hardly be the answer.

On a sudden impulse, he unlocked a drawer in the mahogany desk and stared down at the blued-steel barrel of his Colt .45—a relic of his war years.

The reek of cordite, which lingered in the heavy drapes of the room, and hovered in the air above the expensive carpet, was particularly strong here. He reached down and took up the pistol, and froze as amazement lanced through him.

The barrel was hot, stinging his fingertips!

He sniffed the muzzle, then snapped the breech and counted the cartridges. One bullet had been fired, and recently. The conclusion was inescapable . . .

The weapon that had sought his life was his own gun!

Shaken and unnerved by the inexplicable experience, Lux left the office, telling his secretary to cancel all appointments, as he was leaving for the day.

* * * *

He rode down to ground level in his private express elevator and strode out through the marble-paved lobby of the Lux Building and into the street. He could have called for his chauffeur, but he felt like walking. Fresh air and sunshine might clear his head.

The nearest bar was across the street, on the far corner of the block. He felt in such a dazed, bewildered mood that perhaps an ice-cold Martini would do him good. He strode through the early afternoon crowd to the corner, waited for the traffic light to change, and started across.

Some vague premonition, perhaps a blur of sudden movement at the periphery of his vision, made him glance suddenly over his shoulder.

Although the light was still green and the traffic stood immobile, waiting for the pedestrians to cross, one car had surged suddenly into motion. It was one of the new turbo cars, a huge, glittering machine, and it was bearing down at him with whirling speed.

The pedestrians to either side broke in a panic and scattered. But Lux stood as if rooted to the pavement, unable to move, unable even to think.

Like a gleaming, enormous projectile, the huge vehicle flashed toward him, swelling to gigantic proportions. In an instant his broken, mangled body would be slammed aside, flying through the air, to crash against the pavement, oozing crimson. He could not possibly leap clear; the car was almost on top of him; another instant and—

—he found himself suddenly on the sidewalk, clutching a lamppost, streaming with perspiration from every pore!

Raising his eyes, he saw the huge, gleaming turbo car race through the empty space his body had occupied a fraction of second before.

Cries and shouts of alarm sounded all about him, and the shrilling of a police whistle, the squeal of brakes. He shut his eyes, suddenly faint, and opened them as a huge hand clamped on his arm in a tight grip. A police officer, red-faced, stared at him.

My God, it’s Mr. Lux! That was a close call—I could have sworn you were a goner—crazy hit-and-run maniac! The officer broke off, red face puzzled. But how did you jump out of the way in time! I could have sworn you—are you all right, sir? Shall I call an ambulance?

Lux swallowed, and forced his will down like an iron vise on his trembling body.

No—no need for that, Officer—thanks, but what I need right now is a drink!

The interior of O’Leary’s was cool and dark, and it smelled of leather upholstery and expensive cigars. He chose a secluded table in a dark corner and gulped down a bitterly cold Martini and lit a cigarette, drawing the blue smoke deep into his lungs, letting it out slowly.

He supposed he was a brave man, but two attempts on his life within the span of thirty minutes is enough to shake up anyone! Ordering a second drink, he sat there and let the tension drain out of him slowly.

No businessman can rise as high as Lux, and as fast, without making enemies. Surely he had made a few. Not yet forty, he was at the helm of a giant industrial complex, with a finger in half a hundred pies. No doubt there were enough business rivals around who wished him in his grave!

For that matter, he held several top-secret defense contracts, too. There was that mysterious what-is-it they were putting together out in Farmersville—the robot nuclear missile. Half a dozen foreign powers would love to get their hands on the specifications for the missile—and would probably settle for having him put out of the way, and the corporation thrust suddenly into receivership, thus putting an end to the missile project.

But—no, neither business rivals nor international espionage was behind these mysterious assaults on his life, of that he was certain. For both of the mysterious attacks had savored of the inexplicable—the weird—even the occult. No visible murderer had leveled that pistol at his brain. And as for the incident of the turbo car, well, there had been an eerie shadow of the unknown cast across that incident, too. For as he had clung to the lamppost, watching the murder car hurtle through the vacancy where his body had been only a split second before, he had gotten a clear look into the driver’s seat.

And there had been no driver.

No one at all had been riding in the car that had tried to kill him!

Finishing his second drink, John Lux used the phone in the back of the bar and called for his chauffeur. A few minutes later a long black limousine pulled up, and Lux got in. The air conditioning was cool and tangy; the car glided into the stream of traffic.

Lux rubbed his brow, thinking. Today was Friday. The weekend lay ahead of him. He had planned to stay in his East Side town house this weekend, and had thought to call Marlene and make a date for dinner. But he felt too jumpy, too distraught. Suddenly, for some reason, he thought of Dr. Havering. It had been many months since he had last visited the older man, who had been one of his professors at college. A rare understanding had sprung up between the two men, so very different in age, in experience, even in temperament. Havering was the perfect companion for his mood; Lux felt a deep urge to discuss the inexplicable events of the day with some intelligent, first-class mind, to talk things out.

He remembered, too, and with a growing sense of excitement, that while Dr. Havering’s chosen field was in the area of behavioral psychology, he had for many years held a special interest in the odd, the uncanny, the inexplicable—the sort of Fortean phenomena which was known to occur, but which fitted none of the theories or laws of orthodox science. With Havering, he felt assured of a sympathetic ear and a mature understanding.

The Doctor, he recalled, had retired from teaching some years before, and lived in a secluded house on the edge of the city. Yielding to an irresistible impulse, Lux took up the interphone and directed his driver to pull over to the curb. He got behind the wheel, handed the man a twenty-dollar bill and told him to take a taxi home, and pulled away from the curb, leaving his chauffeur staring after him in puzzlement.

* * * *

The long drive out of the city gave Lux an opportunity to relax. Sunset painted the west with its crimson as Lux pulled off the highway into a private side road, traced a long curve past rows of great oaks, and pulled up before a large old house, all warm red brick, creamy stucco, and dark wood.

Havering’s man servant, a Filipino named Komo, answered the doorbell and admitted Lux into a dark hall. Heavy antique furniture gleamed with polished wax in the dim light; an excellent Persian carpet was luxuriously soft underfoot. In a moment the silent little man returned to lead Lux into the library, where the older man awaited him.

Havering had a tanned, lean face with aristocratic features and fine, intelligent eyes under a wide brow and smooth