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22 chapters
THE TIME ARMADA
THE TIME ARMADA
5:20 P. M., April 17, 1958 Congressman Douglas Blair shivered a little, turned up his coat collar against the gray drizzle that had been falling like a finely-sifted fog all day. His head ached, his nose felt stuffy, and he was tired. It was good of Grayson to pick him up. The front seat of the dark blue sedan was soft and reassuring, and the warm current of air from the heater beneath it felt good. He let his spare, barely six-foot body slump like a bag of wet wash and pushed his hat back with
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
She was clad in superbly tailored cream-colored slacks of a material that was glass-like in sheen, an equally well-fitted blouse of forest green hardly a shadow less than opaque, and sandals of a soft, flexible texture slightly raised at the heel. The wide cummerbund of silken flame that circled her slender waist was her only ornamentation. Doug's pastel shirt felt like a feather; it lay open at the throat and clung comfortably about his chest and shoulders, then tapered leisurely to his waist.
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CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
It was light. Terry had been watching the darkness fade for about ten minutes, fascinated, because the diffused glow grew as though from nowhere, and he could not find the sun. At first he'd felt sort of scared, but nothing happened, so he'd kept watching, trying to find it. He was still in bed. It was when he became aware that it wasn't his own bed that he sat up straight, wondering, trying to remember. He was in a long, narrow place, and there were a lot of beds—bunks, like his own, lining eac
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CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER IV
The price of the paper was $3,000. "Doug—do we dare—" "No. We've only got a second or so, as though we were just interested passersby, looking at the headlines. Got to be careful." PRELATINATE OKs MORE FUNDS FOR SCHOOLS the eight-column streamer read. Doug scanned the two-column lead quickly. "Washington, April, 17—(WP)—Prelate General Wendel announced through his press headquarters here tonight that both houses of the Prelatinate have unanimously voted to grant the request of the Council of Edu
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CHAPTER V
CHAPTER V
When the 'copter swished to a feather-like landing on the wide expanse of the front lawn, Doug was ready. He had dressed himself in one of the dozen uniforms he had found arrayed in neat order in a full-length bedroom closet. He fastened the cape at his throat, wished suddenly that there was some way he could take Dot with him. Suddenly she was in his arms, and Doug could feel her tremble. "Don't worry, honey," Doug said. He opened the door. "So far it looks pretty civilized—hell, they couldn't
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CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VI
He had thought like a child to have believed he could have done more than bluff. He had thought like a child to have taken the impossible gamble at all. Already he had committed a fatal error, and he knew that were it not for his physical appearance the farce would not have lasted ten seconds. Nonsense! Was not a high stake worth the toss of any dice? Perhaps he was slightly mad, but he had not thought like a child. Slightly mad, mad enough to suppose that to win happiness there must be courage,
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CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VII
"I am apparently a relatively high official in the government. It is called a Congressman. Although there are many others of equal and superior rank, I am well liked. I have a strong political following." "Was there any suspicion?" "None at all. I had the good fortune, almost immediately upon discovering my role in this civilization, to gain access to a number of speech recordings our host had made. His voice is very little different than mine, and of course within about thirty minutes I had mas
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CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER VIII
Dot's face was tense as she watched him. Doug held the delicate phone device to his ear with pressure that made his flesh white around it. He was oblivious to the wonder-like comforts of the beautiful home now, cursing it subconsciously as though it had been built for the sole purpose of trapping him, imprisoning him here. The high-pitched signal in the receiver repeated evenly and he forced himself to wait. His fingers drummed an uneven tattoo on the low table, vibrated the dismantled parts of
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CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER IX
The ugly, black building stood out like a shapeless smudge of soot against the milk-white sky, but it was by sheer accident that Terry and Mike discovered it, built as it was at the water's edge where the high blue grass had been neither trampled nor trimmed, and at a distance further from the training areas than they had ever ventured. "We'd better go back, Terry. We'll get in trouble." Mike's young body glistened with perspiration as he stood on the knoll with his brother, eyes still fastened
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CHAPTER X
CHAPTER X
Doug worked silently. His eyes stung, and he wasted a moment to rub them again, because he must see, must see so precisely, so exactly. The work table was almost bare of the equipment he had ordered. The new Contraption had devoured it into its fantastic vitals as fast as his taut hands and flagging memory were able to feed. Yet it was useless work—the gleaming thing he had built would never so much as fry an egg. Yet he worked as though the power-pack were resting on the table among the scraps
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CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XI
Acceleration had left Doug at the brink of unconsciousness despite the hammock in which they'd secured him, but gradually the roar in his ears subsided and the words took shape, as though they were being spoken from the bottom of an empty well. "... SQ check one ... speed five-three thousand one two oh, acceleration two point one, steady ... trajectory minus two point oh five seconds at eight thousand two hundred, three hundred, four, five, compensate please ... plus point oh three seconds at ni
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CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XII
After Doug had gone, Dot tried to make herself forget why he had gone, where he was going. She wanted the old conviction to come back; she wanted to be smugly sure again that it was impossible for him to fly to another planet, and that what he had said was just a great joke. She twisted a dial on the luxurious radio console, sat for a moment beside it and wished that she could as easily twist fact away from belief, so that the awful fear would go. Yet blindness to fact was no answer to fear of i
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CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIII
"Inside Venus compensation limit, sir. They've taken over. Inversion in three minutes; jet-down at NMHQ in twelve. Secondary check please, sergeant." Space had been monotonous. After the first thrill of watching Earth grow smaller and smaller until it was nothing more than another planet in the heavens, after the realization that the studded blackness to each side was real, and not some gigantic planetarium show, the trip had been a seemingly motionless thing, like high flight in a light plane a
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CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XIV
Carl Grayson lit a cigarette. Senior Quadrate Blair watched him closely as he went over the last of his notes. The man was obviously disturbed, but only about the interview itself. There had not been an instant's suspicion; Blair was certain of it. The greatest danger was over. It had been a danger ever-present with first meetings but with each, it had become progressively easier with which to cope, yet with the man Grayson, there had been unexpected pitfalls. These strange people indulged in a
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CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XV
As Doug marched, he thought. There was less than an hour yet of marching to complete the great circle, to devise a plan. Two boys in five hundred thousand. An impersonation now demanding so complex a knowledge of the situation of which it was the center that to carry it to successful conclusion would be impossible. Even a moment's belief otherwise was rank stupidity. Escape? Yes, by himself somehow, perhaps he could escape in one of the two sleek ships even now being serviced on the plaza; that
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CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVI
Doug stood motionless as his dress sword was whipped from its scabbard, snapped across the bent knee of one of the Director's guards, and cast at his feet. A second denuded him of the wide belt and narrow scabbard which had held it. "Sir, unless you are able to cite well-founded charges for this outrageous action, I can assure you it will be reported to the Prelate General at once!" Doug bit the words out knowing that as a defensive threat they were hopelessly impotent, but he had to know what t
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CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVII
He locked the top button at full depression and struggled to keep his legs straight beneath him, braced as they were now against a bulkhead which but a few minutes before had been, not a floor, but a wall. The ship's gyro system was no longer functioning as a pseudograv unit, but rather as a vertical stabilizer, and the second dial said four gravities. The acceleration needle dropped with agonizing slowness. Four gravities, three point seven. The altimeter said one hundred thousand feet, then ni
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CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XVIII
The white, sterile room seemed to have closed in upon itself since she had been first brought to it so many hours before, and the heavy desk was now just a great mass of steel, its curved lines no longer distinct, but trailing off somewhere in an incomprehensible geometry of their own. There was movement behind the desk, white, blurry movement that blended with the walls, but the flesh-colored mask that hovered above it did not seem to move at all. Dot's eyes could no longer focus for the fatigu
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CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XIX
He estimated that there would be five minutes at the most before the area was flooded with S-men. The rest of the gamble hinged entirely on what they succeeded in doing, or failed to do, within the space of a few hundred heart-beats. They made the roadside in little more than a minute after leaving the ship. Terry and Mike lay prone in the wide drainage gutter, their swords drawn, their bodies camouflaged by a few handfuls of hastily hacked scrub brush. Doug stood at the side of the superhighway
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CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XX
Slowly, Doug straightened, descended the stairs with Dot's trembling body still in his arms. The boys stood motionless. There was only the sound of Dot's quiet sobbing, and that of Doug's boots as they struck hollow sounds from the steel stair treads, moved heavily as though fitted to the legs of an awkward robot to scatter the shattered bits of the power-pack tubes and crush them as they came underfoot. Gently, he put her down. The boys knelt at either side of her, Doug himself before her. "Don
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CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXI
A dozen men clad in white uniforms of the S-Council surrounded them, and there were weapons in their hands. Senior Quadrate Blair understood. Partially, he understood. He had been reading a banner headline, and then suddenly—suddenly there had been an indescribable moment of utter dark, of awful timelessness—and cold. And there was still the cold, tangible and fluorescing in a green-blue flame about him. Through it he could see the white blurs—the men in white. S-men.... "Lisa—" He felt her besi
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CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXII
The night was quiet, and the air was warm and still. The man and the woman walked close together, and with slow, unmeasured steps, as though the great, slumbering city was a garden, and they were exploring it for the first time. They did not speak, for their eyes were wide, engrossed simply in seeing. A soldier passed them, then a man who might have been a store-clerk, a student, a salesman, a clergyman, a scientist. A young couple approached from the opposite direction, saying quiet things to e
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