Dracula Unbound (2 page)

In the midst of this solar turmoil—as those in the observatory had predicted—a magnesium-white eruption flowered.

“Now!” cried the leader. The thirty seconds were up.

They flung themselves down on the floor behind the metal barrier, burying their heads in their arms, closing their eyes.

Precisely at the time they had estimated, the shell flash ejected from the sun. It illuminated the world with floods of light and fury. Screaming wind followed it in a shock wave, traveling along down the throat of the system until, many hours later, it punched itself out beyond the heliopause and far into outer space. As it radiated outward, it licked with its scorching tongue much of the atmosphere from the vulnerable worlds in its path.

Only the four scientists were prepared for the event.

They lay behind their shelter while the world smoldered outside. Their guardian had fallen like a cinder.

They rose cautiously at last. They stood. They stared at each other, stared at the blackened landscape outside, where the Bastion remained intact. Then, according to plan, they headed for the stairs leading to the upper floors. Electrostatic action in the tormented air rendered the elevators inoperative. Their hair sparkled and sang as they moved.

Oxygen was scarce. Yet they forced themselves on, knowing they must act now, while the Fleet Ones were stunned.

Through waves of heat they climbed, dragging the vitiated air into their lungs. On one landing they collected a wing from a storage cupboard, on another landing another wing. Sections of body structure, improvised from dismantled parts of the Mechanism, were also gathered as they climbed. By the time they reached the observatory on the highest level, they had merely to secure the various parts together and they had a glider large enough to carry a man.

The landscape they surveyed was covered in fast-moving smoke. The pall washed against the two edifices of Bastion and Mechanism like a spring tide.

One detail they did observe. The bloodthirst-plants were cautiously poking their muzzles from the ground again. They were intelligent enough, yet part of nature enough, to have sensed when the shell flash was coming and to retreat underground from it. But the men wasted little time in observing the phenomenon.

“Is the air calm enough for flight?” a small, bearded man asked the leader. “Suppose all the cities containing men have just been destroyed by fire?”

“We've no alternative but to try,” said the leader. “This is our one chance. The next shell flash is many lifetimes away.” Yet he paused before climbing into the glider, as if to hear what his friends had to say at this solemn moment.

The bearded man perhaps regretted his hesitation in the face of the other's courage.

“Yes, of course you must go,” he said. “Somehow we have to get word of what is happening here back to the far past. The ginger man has to be informed.”

The scientist standing next to him said, in sorrowful disagreement, “Yet all the old legends say that Dracula destroyed Stoker.”

The leader answered firmly, addressing them all, with the sense of parting heavy upon them. “We have argued the situation through sufficiently. Those old legends may be wrong, for we well understand how history can be changed. Our given three-dimensional space is only one dimension within the universe's four-dimensional space. Time is a flexible element within it. No particle has a definite path, as the uncertainty principle states. We have been enslaved here at the end of the world in order to help generate the colossal voltages the Fleet Ones require to regiment those paths. I shall seek out the other end of their trail—and there I believe the legendary Stoker is to be found. It is Stoker after all who is one of Earth's heroes, the stoker—as his name implies—who brought fire with which to burn out a great chance for all mankind.”

“So he did,” agreed the others, almost in chorus. And one of them, the youngest, added, “After all, this horrendous present, according to the laws of chaos, is a probability only, not an actuality. History can be changed.”

The leader began to step into the glider. Again the bearded man detained him.

“Just wait till these winds have died. The glider will have a better chance then.”

“And then the Fleet Ones will be back on the attack. It's necessary that I go now.”

He looked searchingly into their faces. “I know you will suffer for this. My regret is that we were unable to fashion a plane large enough to carry all four of us. Always remember—I shall succeed or die in the attempt.”

“There are states far worse than death where the Fleet Ones are concerned,” said the bearded man, mustering a smile. He made to shake the leader's hand, changed his mind, and embraced him warmly instead.

“Farewell, Alwyn. God's grace guide you.”

The leader stepped into the machine.

The others as prearranged pushed it to the edge of the drop—and over. The glider fell until its wings bit into the air. It steadied. It began to fly. It circled, it even gained height. It began heading toward the east.

The scientists left behind stood watching until the glider was faint in the murk.

Their voices too went with the wind.

“Farewell, Alwyn!”

1

State Highway 18 runs north from St. George, through the Iron Mountains, to the Escalante Desert. One day in 1999, it also ran into a past so distant nobody had ever dared visualize it.

Bernard Clift had worked in this part of Utah before, often assisted by students from Dixie College with a leaning toward paleontology. This summer, Clift's instincts had led him to dig on the faulty stretch of rock the students called Old John, after the lumber-built privy near the site, set up by a forgotten nineteenth-century prospector.

Clift was a thin, spare man, deeply tanned, of medium height, his sharp features and penetrating gray eyes famous well beyond the limits of his own profession. There was a tenseness about him today, as if he knew that under his hand lay a discovery which was to bring him even greater fame, and to release on the world new perspectives and new terror.

Over the dig a spread of blue canvas, of a deeper blue than the Utah sky, had been erected to shade Clift and his fellow-workers from the sun. Clustered below the brow of rock where they worked were a dozen miscellaneous vehicles—Clift's trailer, a trailer from Enterprise which served food and drink all day, and the cars and campers belonging to students and helpers.

A dirt road led from this encampment into the desert. All was solitude and stillness, apart from the activity centered on Old John. There Clift knelt in his dusty jeans, brushing soil and crumbs of rock from the fossilized wooden lid they had uncovered.

Scattered bones of a dinosaur of the Saurischian order had been extracted from the rock, labeled, temporarily identified as belonging to a large theropod, and packed into crates. Now, in a stratum below the dinosaur grave, the new find was revealed.

Several people crowded round the freshly excavated hole in which Clift worked with one assistant. Cautious digging had revealed fossil wood, which slowly emerged in the shape of a coffin. On the lid of the coffin, a sign had been carved:

Overhead, a vulture wheeled, settling on a pinnacle of rock near the dig. It waited.

Clift levered at the ancient lid. Suddenly, it split along the middle and broke. The paleontologist lifted the shard away. A smell, too ancient to be called the scent of death, drifted out into the hot dry air.

A girl student with the Dixie College insignia on her T-shirt yelped and ran from the group as she saw what lay in the coffin.

Using his brush, Clift swept away a layer of red ocher. His assistant collected fragile remains of dead blossom, placing them reverently in a plastic bag. A skeleton in human form was revealed, lying on its side. Tenderly, Clift brushed clear the upper plates of the skull. It was twisted round so that it appeared to stare upward at the world of light with round ochered eyes.

The head offices and laboratories of thriving Bodenland Enterprises were encompassed in bronzed glass-curtain walls, shaped in neocubist form and disposed so that they dominated one road approach into Dallas, Texas.

At this hour of the morning the facade reflected the sun into the eyes of anyone approaching the corporation from the airport—as was an imposing lady who had flown in from Washington on a government craft. She was sheathed in a fabric which reflected back something of the luster from the corporation.

Her name was Elsa Schatzman, thrice-divorced daughter of Eliah Schatzman, and First Secretary at the Washington Department of the Environment. She looked as if she wielded power, and she did.

Joe Bodenland knew that Elsa Schatzman was in the offing. At present, however, he had little thought for her, being involved in an argument with his life's companion, Mina Legrand. While they talked, Bodenland's secretary continued discreetly to work at her desk.

“First things first, Birdie,” said Bodenland, with a patience that was calculated to vex Mina.

Mina Legrand was another powerful lady, although the genial lines of her face did not proclaim that fact. She was tall and still graceful, although currently having weight problems despite an active life. Friends said of her, affectionately, that she put up with a lot of hassle from Joe; still closer friends observed that of late he was putting up with plenty from Mina.

“Joe, your priorities are all screwed up. You must make time for your family,” she said.

“I'll make time, but first things first,” he repeated.

“The first thing is it's your son's wedding day,” Mina said. “I warn you, Joe, I'm going to fly down to Gondwana without you. One of these days I'll leave you for good, I swear I will.”

Joe played a tune on his desk top with the fingers of his left hand. They were long blunt fingers with wide spadelike nails, ridged and hard. Bodenland himself resembled his fingers. He too was long and blunt, with an element of hardness in him that had enabled him to lead an adventurous life as well as to succeed in the competitive international world of selling scientific research. He set his head toward his right shoulder with a characteristic gesture as he asked, “How long has Larry been engaged to Kylie? Under a year. How long have we been pursuing the idea of inertial disposal? Over five years. Millions of dollars hang on Washington's favorable reception of today's demonstration. I just have to be here, Birdie, and that's that.”

“Larry will never forgive you. Nor will I.”

“You will, Mina. So will Larry. Because you two are human. Washington ain't.”

“All right, Joe—you have the last word as usual. But you're in deep trouble as of now.” With that, Mina turned and marched from the office. The door closed silently behind her; its suction arm prevented it from slamming.

“I'll be down there just as soon as I can,” Bodenland called, having a last-minute twinge of anxiety.

He turned to his secretary, Rose Gladwin, who had sat silently at her desk, eyes down, while this heated conversation was going on.

“Birth, death, the great spirit of scientific inquiry—which of those is most important to a human being, Rose?”

She looked up with a slight smile.

“The great spirit of scientific inquiry, Joe,” she said.

“You always have the right answer.”

“I'm just informed that Ms. Schatzman is en route from the airport right now.”

“Let me know as soon as she arrives. I'll be with Waldgrave.”

He glanced at his watch as he went out, and walked briskly down the corridor cursing Washington and himself. It annoyed him to think that Larry was getting married at all. Marriage was so old-fashioned, yet now, at the turn of the century, it was coming back into fashion.

Bodenland and his senior research scientist, Waldgrave, were waiting in the reception area to welcome Ms. Schatzman when she arrived with her entourage. She was paraded through the technical floor, where everyone had been instructed to continue working as usual, to the laboratory with the sign in gilt on its glass door,
INERTIAL RESEARCH
.

Schatzman's questions indicated she had been properly briefed. He liked that, and her slightly plump fortyish figure in a tailored suit which signaled to him that human nature survived under the official exterior.

Various important figures were gathered in the lab for the demonstration, including a backer from the Bull-Brunswick Bank. Bodenland introduced Schatzman to some of them while technicians made everything finally ready. As she was shaking hands with the Bank, one of Bodenland's aides came up and spoke softly in Bodenland's ear.

“There's an urgent call for you from Utah, Joe. Bernard Clift, the archeologist. Says he has made an important discovery.”

“Okay, Mike. Tell Bernard I'll call him back when possible.”

In the center of the lab stood a glass cabinet much resembling a shower enclosure. Cables ran into it from computers and other machines, near which two assistants stood by a switchboard. The hum of power filled the air, lending extra tension to the meeting.