Timepit

by Brian Ball

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

What happened to the colossal dimensional engine of the Forever Planet? What happened to the mysterious Pivot of Time? TIMEPIECE told of the eerie extra-Universals who manufactured that vast and strange engine: TIMEPIT moves on to a day when the Pivot of Time has been locked away, to keep its terrifying powers from the curious an the bold. For centuries its safety is assured...like a precious fetish it is stored away, to be visited as it it were some magic touchstone. And then a wasp stung Kelp on the nose! Kelp, curious, bold, resourceful, had been prisoner in the warm ooze of the coma-cells since the time of his arrest. His crime? He tried to investigate the secrets of the Pivot of Time. A wasp-sting brought him from a ten-year sleep into a sharp awareness of a mission unaccomplished. He leapt into action! Kelp's insatiable curiosity and boundless resources enabled him to smash the fearful guardians of the Timepivot but the consequences of Kelp's tampering with the Timepivot were indeed vast and terrible.

Release date: June 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

Kelp wiped the sweat from his face with the stained bandana and reached for the white body: the full peaked nipples twitched. ‘I’ve fought for you and by Christ I’m having you!’ he growled.

The girl’s voice was thick, barely controlled, as if she were drugged. ‘At least put your rifle down,’ she murmured. Her shattered dress parted.

Kelp grinned, his grit-marked, bronzed face lighting up wryly: ‘A man has to hold on to the tools of his trade.’

Then the end of his nose exploded.

‘Yaarghaieeeeee!!!’

Through a mist of pain Kelp gripped the rifle hard to blast his latest enemy into bloody rags.

‘I’ll kill the bastard that hit me!!’

‘May the madmen of Mars transmogrify the swine!!!’

His eyes cleared. The girl was still there, still calling throatily to him: ‘Titus! Oh, Titus, my man!!’ There was no enemy. Pain blossomed again, filling his whole horizon. When it cleared, he saw that the girl was above, not below him. She spoke from a curved screen: he lay foetally curled in a bath of warm porridge. The bath was in the centre of a dark, damp cell, festooned with tubes and wires, and, in the background, masses of shimmering control machinery. When he looked down, Kelp saw that it was not a rifle that he was gripping so tightly.

The girl murmured again from the great screen: ‘You are Titus Mackenzie, white hunter and great lover,’ she suggested. Kelp began to feel disorientated, but the pain brought him back to an awareness of the warm gooey substance in which he lay. ‘You are Titus Mackenzie,’ the girl said again, but with a hint of panic.

‘No,’ said Kelp. ‘I am Kelp and a bloody wasp has just stung me on the nose!’

Kelp knew that he had at most fifteen seconds to escape from the coma-cell. The wasp jumped out of the way as he swept his hand to the pain-filled nose. It buzzed away, convinced of the justice of its action and satisfied with its inspection of the damage it had done.

The nubile girl mistily dissolved from the screen, to be replaced by the blank features of the duty gaoler, a second-class almost-human robot. ‘Kelp’s reacted!’ it said gravely. ‘Return him to the coma.’

Kelp’s fearsome range of physical skills took over as, naked, he leapt from the clinging goo to dodge the anaesthetizing sprays. They swished over the wasp which plunged into the bath with one last outraged buzz. The attendant robot trundled out of its niche and advanced with open tentacles to secure Kelp. Without hesitation, he wrenched a bulky sanitation unit from its mounting and hurled it into the web of robotic tentacles. The robot, a low-grade orderly, happily seized the unit and rushed across to the bath of warm porridge. ‘Three-Nine reporting,’ it called. ‘I have arrested Kelp and returned him to the coma-cellule!’

‘Darling! You’ve returned! Oh, Titus!’ called the screen again. The girl reached out for a plastic tentacle. The robot gazed in astonishment at the screen.

‘Gobblegook!’ it said as Kelp pushed it firmly into the goo. Kelp spared a second’s thought for the wasp and its incredible tenuity of life; he grimaced as he thought of its perilous journey through the passages and tubes of the most secure gaol in the settled Galaxy. He hoped it would drown at peace in the sticky, analgesic mess. He wondered if he would be able to circumvent the perils and obstacles on his own journey out of the gaol, as the wasp had done on the inward journey. His nose glowed angrily in front of his vision.

Sirens clamoured as he stepped through the door. The noise robbed him of the fierce determination which had carried flabby muscles and heavy body so far. Where was he to go?

And, he thought, as the sirens wailed into quietness, what was he to do?

He looked at the coma-cell door. The details were simple enough:

KELP Committed: March 3729 A.B.U.Date of release:—Crime:—

 

Momentarily dismayed, Kelp realised that all he knew was that he, Kelp, had been a prisoner—maybe still was—for a number of years. The slack body told him that much.

He had been imprisoned in March, three thousand, seven hundred and twenty-nine years after the great Blow-Up of the old, primordial worlds.

And the sentence was for life.

He had given maximum offence.

How?

A robot trundled down the bright passageway, peering through the inspection screens as it went. Kelp felt gruesomely exposed, covered as he was only patchily by the drying goo.

‘Good afternoon, sir!’ said the robot.

Kelp could barely believe his luck.

‘What’s the noise for?’ he said. There could be no general alarm as yet, no instant MOST IMMEDIATE despatches to Galactic Security Control and then to the tired few men who were all that could be found to take on the ultimate responsibility for prisoners for Kelp’s calibre. But why? Kelp made conversation: ‘There seems to be an unusual amount of activity?’

‘Yes, sir, and to your first question I can only answer that there must have been an alert practice, for I see no further cause for alarm.’

‘Why are you here?’ asked Kelp.

The robot was a high-grade automaton and decision-maker in some branch of Galactic Control. Gradually, Kelp began to believe in his luck. The luck of the Kelps, he heard himself saying. Others had said that. Who? When? Why? It was associated with an overwhelming sense of loss. Kelp, not an imaginative man, began to shudder. He knew that when the years of coma-treatment had worn off, there would be appalling discoveries.

‘I am a student of the human, sir,’ the robot said. It peered interestedly at Kelp. ‘I have a great love for the human condition, sir. At every opportunity I like to visit the poor derelicts incarcerated here.’

‘Why?’

‘They look so happy sir! Why, I’ve never known so much sheer joy in the Galaxy as is contained in this block! If only every human could share in it!’

‘Why don’t you?’

‘Ah, sir—the Law, sir!’

‘Turn off all your communicators except person to person.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The robot stripped itself of the power to communicate with its fellows. ‘Why, I was looking in on this human, sir, a human called Kelp. So happy! So thoroughly at home in the vast open spaces of a place called Africa on a planet called Earth!’

‘You’d do anything for a human, wouldn’t you?’

‘The Law, sir—the Law! And why not, sir!’

Kelp recalled now with an aching vividness the burning veldt, the thousand brawls, the elephant in the sights of the Martini, the girls of all colours, the sunsets and the wheeling night sky. The White Hunter sequences were nothing if not bright and bold. Not so naive as the Super Swordsman series, but better plotted than the Cosmic Captain episodes.

Kelp, White-Swordsman-Captain, was brought back to the present incredible reality by the robot’s asinine remarks about another of the prisoners.

‘A beautiful lady, sir! So stout and comfortable! She emotes joy!’ The robot broke off as two more robots, guards with sinister protuberances like warts over their heads, appeared. Kelp turned to run.

‘Can I be of assistance, sir?’ asked the earnest student.

‘Destroy those,’ said Kelp, pointing to the guard robots.

‘Stop that human!’ one shouted.

‘Stop K——!!’

Crisp blue light flew momentarily in the space between the two advancing robots and Kelp’s inquisitive automaton. A jangling of shattered molecules hung poised in the damp air.

‘Is that all, sir?’

A siren howled and an anxious metallic voice stuttered around them:

‘Arrest Kelp! Stop the enemy of Order! Apprehend the escaped Kelp!’

‘Excuse me, sir,’ said the robot, ‘but I can’t be right surely—you aren’t Kelp, are you?’

‘A strange idea,’ said Kelp. He was beginning to get the glimmer of an idea: Order. That was the key. ‘And why should Kelp be of such interest to you?’

‘Yes, I suppose it’s ridiculous. You couldn’t be Kelp!’

‘No,’ said Kelp. ‘As a matter of fact, I am the new Director of the Galactic Gaol.’

‘I’m so sorry, sir! Excellency!’

‘Director, please.’

‘Director!’

‘Now about this Kelp. Why the interest?’

‘In a way I’ve always admired him—strange, I agree, but the sheer enormity of his crimes! Staggering! He’s – he’s the—the Universal criminal!’

‘Take me to the Property Store.’

‘Of course, sir! May I ask why?’

‘Yes.’ Kelp knew now that there was an urgent purpose. There was something to be done. ‘There’s some of the prisoners’ equipment I want to pick up.’

They walked along the corridors. No more alarm calls disturbed the dank peace. Row after row of coma-cells, each with its little plate describing the crimes of the inmate. On none was there a release date. Kelp stopped. He looked at the blank face, noted the subservient air and wondered at the level of sophistication of the robot.

‘Inspection,’ he said. ‘You must bring the prisoners out. All of them. To the Property Store.’

Hesitantly the answer came back:

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I am the Director!’

‘Yes, sir.’ More assuredly.

‘A Director of a Gaol.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘A Director must inspect his prisoners!’

‘Oh, yes, sir!’

They had reached the Administrative area, a place of cavernous dim-lighted rooms, and where there was a pronounced stench of decay. That would be the prisoners’ property.

‘Hurry!’ ordered Kelp.

The robot fled.

‘How long?’ muttered Kelp, looking at pale skin and sagging muscle. How long had he lain in the warm dark, foetally straining at electronic myth? His nose was bright red, a beacon of a nose.

A premonition of horror ahead made him turn before he opened the entrance to the store of prisoners’ equipment. It was not the thought of the centuries-old accumulation of pathetic effects now mouldering in the subterranean caverns that disturbed him. Other memories were returning. He knew, knew without being consciously aware of acquiring the knowledge, that in their deep pits the leprous undead guardians of the Timepivot would be stirring. And with cause.

Kelp searched for his own shabby, functional gear. He counted the minutes he had in hand before the ineffective robotic alert mechanisms managed to pass on the news of his escape. Five minutes? Ten? A few more? Before the hunt began he had to divert the attention of the local machinery for search-and-apprehend operations.

The years when they are numbered in hundreds began to have an aroma of their own: it clung to the thousands of neatly packed sets of personal gear, to the clothes, the basic necessities of life—to transport units, to odd, unlikely weapons, to shimmering headgear and curious sense-swimming suits, and to the toys and playthings of men and women who had died five or ten hundreds of years before.

Kelp knew where to look. The arrangement of the equipment was logical. Only six people had been committed since his sentence began; the suit with its burnished headcrest lay in the seventh slot. It had served Kelp in a dozen different star systems. Memory returned.

There was almost no feeling of a period of time between his committal and the present. Just a void of unknowing. A noise behind him brought him whirling around with the old, useless savage battle-cry, learned from a race of grotesque misfits who were left to fight their incomprehensible battles in a remote and unlovely planetary system. An antique axe was in his upraised hands.

He relaxed. The dust of centuries had shifted and a great ballooning set of wings that had once carried some daring spirit on the winds of solar radiation fell, collapsing into shards of dust and metal.

Reaction set in as Kelp thought of time.

Time passing whilst he dreamt his mind away. How long had it been? There was, too, the vague urgency about this strange escape. He knew how to get away: knew about the other derelicts, about things like Galactic Control: there were stirrings, too, of a sense of terror. The words coalesced in his mind:

‘… vast and terrible consequences … from your actions!’

The robot had admired his sheer nerve. He was a Universal criminal. There was nothing more frightful.

Me, thought Kelp. Me, the enemy of Order.

He flung on the gear, dressing in seconds. He patted the weapons, the emergency supplies, the old well-chosen necessities of his way of life, whatever that had been. Then the derelicts, with the high-grade robot at their head, began to shamble into the immense store. A large fat woman began to babble.

‘All present, Director!’ the robot reported. ‘A most unusual sight, if I may say so.’

The line of blear-eyed, bloated-stomached, goo-caked men and women blinked sadly at Kelp. He knew how they felt, but he had as little pity for them as he had for himself:

‘Find your gear!’

‘It’s Kelp,’ the fat woman managed to mouth. The rest of what she was trying to say was incomprehensible.

‘It’s the new Director,’ corrected the robot. ‘Is there anything else I can do, sir?’

Kelp pointed to the passage leading to the cells. ‘Go down there. Get into the nearest cell.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘And then blow yourself up.’

‘Very good, sir.’

Several of the derelicts realised that they were not in a comatose condition.

‘It is Kelp!’ wailed the fat woman.

‘Get your gear!’ bellowed Kelp, herding the more wakeful of the dreamy figures deeper into the store.

‘What then?’ asked a thin, decrepit little man. ‘What shall we do?’

‘Do! Do what you did before they stuck you in the coma-cell!’

A look of awe came over the faces of a few. The rest exhibited only that sense of puzzled outrage which Kelp now knew so well. That search through the mist of recent electronic fancies for the reality of another life.

‘Oh, yes,’ murmured the thin little man.

A yellow-bearded man of immense stature—and Kelp remembered that this bag of fat had once been the Sage of Steg-Alpha III who had led the Deathships in a wild charge straight for Galactic Control—began to test the feel of a mass of personal equipment:

‘Who’s Kelp?’ his tired voice demanded.

A sullen explosion rocked the store. More antique equipment drifted down onto the still-stunned derelicts.

‘What’s that?’ squealed the fat woman.

‘The robot,’ said the yellow-bearded man. ‘Who’s Kelp?’

‘Kelp’s a bastard!’ the fat woman said. ‘He’ll have us all pushed into the Screamers!’

‘I like you, fat woman,’ said the thin man, moving forward purposefully.

‘Then come on back to my place!’ she said. ‘Let’s get away from that bastard Kelp!’

‘On!’ yelled Kelp. ‘On to the Control!’

‘Yes, Kelp!’ said the yellow-bearded man. ‘You got the right idea. On! On! On, you lousy bastards!’

‘And do what?’ still said a few, as they struggled with half-remembered gear.

‘Wreck the bloody place!’ sa. . .