Firehand Part 1

Firehand.

by Andre Norton and P.M. Griffin.

1.

ROSS MURDOCK'S EYES flickered to the dancing flames of the small fire he had made. Fire. The ancient symbol of home and hearth. The source of warmth and light. Humanity's ally against the dark and the things, real and imagined, that haunted it. Man's friend. Man's enemy. Fire could hurt, too, as evidenced by his scorched face and hands.

Even in that, it was his aide. Pain, clean physical agony, cut through the chain of mental compulsion with which the starmen were attempting to bind and draw him to their will.

Anger flickered inside him, leaping up like the tongues of his fire. The aliens had hunted him for days now, followed him inexorably as he had struggled downriver in his desperate effort to reach this rendezvous point. They had sought him, and they had turned the awesome powers of their minds against him in an attempt to break him, to force him to return to them. Every step he had taken had been a battle against his own body, and when he had been forced to yield to the need for sleep, he had been compelled to bind himself to a tree or root so as not to turn back in his unconscious state and deliver himself up to them.

His head raised. Injured, hungry, exhausted, he had still made it. He had come too late, but he was here. He was free, and he had beaten their first attack.

He would stay free. Whether he managed by some miracle to return to his own time or was fated to remain in the Bronze Age, whether he lived for long years more or died relatively soon from want or violence, he would perish through an agency born of his own Earth. The Baldies would not have him and would not rule him.

Murdock glanced at the weapon he grasped in his right hand. It did not look like much to set against the crippling force of the aliens, only a burning brand pulled from his driftwood fire, but it would do the job-if he had the courage to use it.

They attacked again, determined to crush his inexplicable resistance, but Ross had braced himself against the agony exploding in his head. His mind remained his own. He could think, and he could control the muscles he must use.

His left hand was splayed on the broad surface of the boulder beside him. Deliberately, ruthlessly, he lowered the flaming head of the brand...

Ross sat up, stifling the cry that had shocked him awake. His heart was still racing from the horror of the dream, and it was several moments before he could completely grip himself.

Blast those Baldies! Blast every one of their thrice-accursed kind! He had no trouble facing the memory of that first clash of wills during his waking hours, but all too often, his sleeping mind seized on the terror and the pain.

Well, this time, it had been his own fault. If he had been spent after his morning's exertions, he should have refreshed himself with a swim instead of stretching out under this tree like some tourist on holiday back on Terra.

The Time Agent came to his feet and walked down the broad beach until he reached the edge of the sea. He breathed deeply, letting the clear air drive out the last clinging shadows of the unpleasant dream.

The scene before him was beautiful, but he studied it somberly, without any feeling of the pleasure it would have invoked under other circ.u.mstances.

Vivid blue sky merged at the horizon with endless blue ocean, which tapered to an exquisite turquoise here in the shallows. The water was warm, perfect for swimming with no even momentary shock of body heat meeting chill liquid upon entering it. The air, too, was perfect, hot but so freshened by the constant sea breezes that it never stifled or exhausted.

Everything was perfect on this Hawaika of the distant past. So d.a.m.ned perfect...

Ross Murdock pressed the scarred fingers of his left hand against his forehead, but then he took hold of himself. They were trapped, irrevocably, and here they must stay for the remainder of their lives. He had to accept that and do what he could to make the best of it, to make some sort of meaningful life for himself.

He could not! He could and would pull his weight, right enough, but there was nothing to hold him, absolutely nothing to which he could devote himself heart and mind, not since he and his comrades, human and dolphins, had joined forces with the local populace and driven off the interstellar invaders bent upon the annihilation of all this world's major life forms.

For an instant, fire stirred in his pale gray eyes. Ever since he had perforce become part of the Project and traveled back to the dim past on his native Terra, he had clashed with those ancient, deadly star-traveling people he had called the Baldies from their enlarged, hairless heads. They were the enemies of his nightmare and subjects fit for nightmare with their high-tech weapons, their fearsome powers of mental control, and their seemingly absolute disregard for life forms other than their own.

His head lifted. He had beaten them that time. He had been part of the team that had taken one of their starships and given it to Terra, that and a library of journey tapes which had opened for his own kind the stars and the planets circling them. He had helped to beat those same killers here.

The light left him again, and he sighed. Hawaika had been one of the worlds to which the Baldies' tapes had brought Terran explorers. They had found a lotus planet lacking any large life forms or history of life-until he, Gordon Ashe, Karara Trehern, and her dolphin companions, Tinorau and Taua, had been drawn back into the planet's past, just at the time when the vicious earlier race was culminating their inexplicable plan to wipe the native life from existence. They had helped unite the peoples-for there were two distinct races-living here and had spearheaded the final attack that drove the invaders off. The loss of the gate through which they had come was proof of their ultimate success. Success and life for Hawaika, doom for him and his.

The young man drew a long, shuddering breath. With their gate gone, they were sealed back in time, in this alien world's history, forever severed from their own age, their own people, their own work. Three months had pa.s.sed since that great battle. Three months, and already it felt like three years. Or thirty...

He scowled as a splash and laugh penetrated his reverie. A slender-bodied woman rose, leaped, out of the water some twenty yards out from him, followed in the next moment by two delighted silver-blue forms, rejoicing as only dolphins can in play.

Ross waved because some reaction was expected of him, but he quickly turned away and began walking toward a rock formation farther down the beach where he might sit and think at peace for a while.

The mission fate had set them had not proven a disaster for all of them, he amended his previous thoughts. The dolphins had adopted this time and world for their own, and Karara...

Murdock shivered despite the heat of the day. This world and time had quite literally been made hers.

In their battle to defeat the invaders, the human Terrans had joined, melded, with the three Foanna, the last remnant of the old, magical race who had once ruled Hawaika. Need had forced them to take that drastic step despite the danger that the effort might leave them somehow altered. He and his partner, Doctor Gordon Ashe, had come through whole. To be more precise, they had been rejected, cast off, by the Powers they had invoked. Not so Trehern. She had been judged and found worthy. Once again, he shuddered, and his eyes closed. When she had stepped forth again, she was something other than human.

Ross made himself watch the trio again. Her personality remained, or it still remained. For that, he blessed whatever G.o.ds ruled the realms of time and s.p.a.ce. He had never been able to like the woman, although he respected her skill and courage. That did not matter. They were comrades, fellow Terrans, humans amidst fine but alien peoples...

Karara had been human. Now she was Foanna, or a shadow of the Foanna, and with every pa.s.sing week, as she grew in the understanding and knowledge of the mysterious three, that difference seemed to increase within and about her.

At first, he had believed this accursed planet had changed Gordon as well, not physically or in nature, but in the relationship they had shared since their first mission together. He, too, had been able to deal easily with the Foanna, and he was a scientist, eager to learn and able to throw himself into the work of learning. It had seemed to him that without the Project to bind them, Ross Murdock had very little to offer to such a man.

The Time Agent's fingers tightened against the sun-warmed stone. He had little to offer Hawaika, either, now that her danger was over. He did not fit. His mind would not link with those of the Foanna, though they could read some part of his thoughts. Moreover, he did not want to give them greater access to his inner being and grudged even what they could take.

Murdock smiled sadly. In his selfishness and self-pity, he had misjudged Ashe's response to their exile. Gordon might be able to use his time better, but he was very nearly as unhappy as Ross was himself.

For starters, the man was an archeologist, not an anthropologist, and he had never been one of those lovers of pure theory who could sit back, joyfully pouring over the facts others had ama.s.sed as a miser did money he would never spend. He, too, had given himself to the Time Project and to the opening of the star worlds it had engendered. To be cut off from all that, to be forced into an observer's place, less than that, was as killing to him as it was to his more restless younger comrade.

As for the bond between them, he had been a proper a.s.s about that. It had not broken or lessened, merely altered in the manner of its manifestation under the very different conditions under which they were now compelled to function.

That the archeologist spent a considerable amount of time with the Foanna was only to be expected given his education and interests and his good fortune in being able to communicate well with them. Lord of Time, Ross thought, unconsciously picking up Eveleen's phrase in the anguish and shame suddenly sweeping him, he should be on his knees in grat.i.tude to them instead of nursing a jealousy even he recognized as childish. It was they who had finally succeeded in healing completely the terrible mental wound the older man had taken with the loss of Travis Fox and his colony. Ashe, unjustly, had held himself responsible for that, and the guilt, the pain of it, had very nearly destroyed him.

"Ross!"

He turned. "Gordon! Over here!"

The other joined him. Ashe was maybe a head taller than Murdock and was some years his senior, but his body was as lean and hard, and as browned now by exposure to Hawaika's sun, although he had insisted that both of them keep covered for the most part lest rays stronger than nature had meant their skin to bear prove deadly to them in the long run.

"Look at those three," Ross said, pointing to the woman and sea mammals with apparent pleasure, as if he had only been enjoying their antics. One thing for sure, he was not about to let himself be caught whimpering over a fate he could not change like some blasted spoiled adolescent.

"They've found their home," Gordon agreed, smiling.

He eyed his companion speculatively but then let his gaze wander along the beach to the tall-masted ship berthed at its farther end. "I watched you and Torgul today. It took you precisely two minutes and forty seconds to disarm him, and he's been training with a sword since the day he could first toddle. Even Eveleen would've been impressed."

A sharp stab of regret raked Ross at the mention of the Project's tough little expert in ancient weapons and unarmed combat. He had to make himself laugh. "She'd tell me fair enough and push me on to working with some other instrument of mayhem."

Still, he was pleased. It was Ashe who had insisted that he learn all he could from the people around them, particularly their combat and seafaring skills, as if he were preparing himself for another mission instead of merely warding off the deadly weight of time and trying to make himself a more salable commodity to better earn his keep...

He had obeyed willingly enough, although without real heart. It was interesting work, at least, and the effort did keep his responses keen and his mind sharp. It also effectively preserved his sanity. Between struggling to acquire the fine points of the Rovers' weapons of war and self-defense and the handling of the ships that were their lives, it was precious little time he had to squander as he had this last quarter hour.

Suddenly, guilt filled him, and he looked somberly at the archeologist. He owed this man so much. "I won't go back," he said abruptly, "not to what I was."

"I never imagined you would." Murdock had been well on the road to the life of a petty criminal when the Project had discovered him, some six Terran years previously, a boy with the instincts of a clan chieftain or commando in an age where such talent was a detriment to all but very specialized groups such as theirs. Ross had proven to be one of the best finds they had made, maybe the best. "You've grown up, my young friend." His eyes sparkled. "Except in the matter of patience."

"We'll need a lifetime of that," he responded quietly, suppressing the regret that threatened to flood his voice.

"I don't know about that," his partner told him. "If I were you, I'd plan on exhibiting my newfound abilities for Eveleen Riordan's approval a lot sooner than that. A matter of days might be a more realistic target."

2.

MURDOCK FELT HIS chest, his stomach, tighten. He took a deep breath to steady himself, then met the other's blue eyes steadily. "Gordon, don't joke about that. I don't find it funny..."

Ashe laughed. "Calm down, Ross Murdock. You've been feeling rather sorry for yourself, I fear, to the detriment of your thinking."

"Go on." He would have liked to tell him in graphic detail where to put that remark, but it was accurate, and he was more interested in an answer right now than in verbally avenging the observation.

"Consider the matter from the Project's point of view. Five experienced, very expensive Time Agents suddenly vanish, and in their place, a full-fledged Hawaikan civilization complete with hitherto equally nonexistent flora and fauna quite literally appears on the scene. What do you imagine their response should be?"

"Put a gate up as fast as they could slap one together and get back to us." The hope withered in him. He did not dare let it run, not yet. "It's been three months, Gordon," he said simply.

"Our time. Besides, there would be the little matter of dealing with the locals and then locating not only the right period but the precise time, the month and week and maybe even the day within it."

Ross turned his gaze to the eternally tossing ocean. "Why didn't you say something before?"

He sighed. "Because I couldn't be sure. There were so many ifs, so many things I just didn't know, so many suppositions and out-and-out guesses. You could accept permanent exile, Ross, but maybe years or a life of uncertainty and waiting-I wasn't about to do that to you. I was having too much of a taste of it myself."

Murdock looked swiftly at him. "I'm sorry." His head lowered. "I haven't been much help."

Gordon smiled. "You've done your share."

"You said a matter of days?" the younger agent prompted, once more feeling the eagerness rising in him. Eagerness? He felt as if he were returning to life.

He nodded. "The Foanna shared my opinion and have been helping me watch for some kind of signal that a breakthrough might be imminent." He grimaced. "To put it more accurately, I've been trying to help them. The Lady Ynvalda discovered something yesterday morning, the beginning of a disturbance, that seems to be what we've been waiting to see."

"Maybe," Ross said sharply. The s.p.a.cers had traveled through a Terran time gate once before, wreaking havoc at every level, and even all of their own race could not be cla.s.sed as friends. Humankind was ever cursed by its divisions, and there were other efforts similar to the Project whose operators would use them as savagely as any shipload of Baldies bent on vengeance if they got half a chance.

"We're not going to be standing there with big smiles and open arms when-if-that gate opens, not until we're d.a.m.n certain who's stepping through it and why."

Murdock's eyes suddenly went once more to the ocean. "Gordon, what about Karara? There's no going back for her. There can't be."

"She's an agent," the other said quietly.

"She was. She's Foanna now, or their creature. If she returns with us, the brain boys'll just grab her and take her apart, or try to do it. She'll never have any kind of life again."

Ross watched the happy trio, in pain himself at the thought of what they might so soon have to endure, worse in a great measure than his own recent misery. All three would be affected, too. Such was their bonding that what hurt the human would hurt the sea mammals as well. "Hawaika, this Hawaika, is Karara's place now. Let her stay, and the dolphins, too, if they're all willing. Just tell the bra.s.s they didn't make it through the fight."

You are generous, Younger Brother, and blessed. To be able to feel and feel for another's pain is no small gift, albeit not always an easy one for the bearer.

That sounded, not in his ears, but directly in his mind. Ross had grown accustomed to the Foanna's method of mental communication by then, but he had to school himself neither to start nor to frown openly as he turned to face the source of those thought-words.

The air before him was shimmering. In the next instant, it seemed to compress and resolved itself into a gray-cloaked figure, the Lady Ynvalda, he saw, when she permitted the deep cowl to draw back and the atmosphere to settle sufficiently for the Terrans to recognize her.

He felt annoyed and did not care if the newcomer detected his irritation. He disliked being perpetually taken by surprise in this manner, and he disliked these theatrics. He also failed to see the purpose of continuing with them, at least so far as the Time Agents were concerned. It was different with the Rovers and Wreckers, he conceded readily, but he and Gordon did not have to be kept impressed.

"Welcome, Lady," Ashe said, as was his right as the humans' leader. "You heard our discussion?"

"In part," she answered in the lilting cadences of her kind's verbal speech.

Ynvalda turned to Murdock. He could feel a shadow of amus.e.m.e.nt, provoked by his annoyance, but her voice and what he could read of her expression were serious when she spoke. "You need have no fear for our sister," she a.s.sured him. "She can protect herself and will pa.s.s through none of your people's gates."

"Unless she chooses to do so," he responded quietly.

The Foanna measured him for a moment. "You are right, Younger Brother," she said softly. "That decision is hers alone. I accept the rebuke."

Ashe released the breath he had been holding. More and more frequently, Ross rose above himself, most often when the rights of others were involved. "I'll speak with her when she comes ash.o.r.e," he promised, "though I think we can all be fairly sure of her answer, and that of the dolphins as well."

Gordon's eyes narrowed even as he fought to control the hope surging within him. "You have some news for us, Lady?" It required a surprisingly strong effort of will to hold his voice steady when he asked that. The thought of home, of Terra, was an ache filling all his being...

She slowly inclined her head in a.s.sent. "I do. The gate has formed and should open shortly, but whether it will be to admit friends or foes, that no mortal on this side of it can know or deduce."

3.

ROSS MURDOCK CROUCHED low behind a tall, broken stone column, his heart slamming in his breast. He licked his lips with a tongue nearly as dry and clutched his weapon more tightly still with hands that already ached with the pressure of his grip.

If the Baldies came through, they would have a fraction-second only to beat them back, throw them off balance until the Foanna could bring their stronger powers to bear. Human enemies could pose an even greater problem...

The grid formed. It was the well-remembered pattern and proclaimed that the equipment being used to generate it, at least, had originated with their own people.

A single, slender figure took form. The newcomer was small and seemed shorter still as he crouched down, trying to minimize the target he presented to anyone waiting to cut him down.

The target she presented. Ross's lips parted in a surprise that would have been ludicrous had anyone removed their eyes from the gate to notice him. Although she was technically an agent, this was one of the last people he would have expected to walk out of the future to collect them.

The woman steeled herself and straightened. "Doctor Ashe, Murdock, Trehern, in the name of whatever, don't shoot me," she said with only the barest undertone of uncertainty to betray the fact that she was not perfectly at ease.

"All right, Miss Riordan," Gordon called out, "come on through... Who else is with you?"

"No one. I'm it."

Eveleen looked about her and caught sight of the younger agent at once. "Ross Murdock!" She held out her hand to him. "I am glad to see you again. Both of you," she added, "but I never had the privilege of teaching you, Doctor Ashe, and so I don't know you quite as well."