THE LEGION OF SPACE DEDICATION To all the readers and the writers of that new literature called science-fiction, who find mystery, wonder, and high adventure in the expanding universe of knowledge, and who sometimes seek to observe and to forecast the vast impact of science upon the lives and minds of men. CONTENTS Prologue THE MAN WHO REMEMBERED TOMORROW 1. A FORT ON MARS 2. AN EYE AND A MURDER 3. THREE MEN OF THE LEGION 4. “WELL, JOHN, I AM A TRAITOR!” 5. THE “PURPLE DREAM” 6. THE EMPTY THRONE 7. GILES HABIBULA’S HIGHER CALLING 8. WITH DEATH BEHIND 9. “To THE RUNAWAY STAR!” 10. FAREWELL TO THE SUN 11. THE TRAP ON PLUTO’S MOON 12. STORM IN SPACE 13. THE BELT OF PERIL 14. CORSAIR SUN 15. UNDER THE UNKNOWN SEA 16. BLACK CONTINENT TO CROSS 17. THE ROPE IN THE JUNGLE 18. NIGHT AND THE CITY OF DOOM 19. GILES HABIBULA AND BLACK DISASTER 20. “A CERTAIN SLIGHT DEXTERITY” 21. THE HORROR IN THE HALL 22. RED STORM AT DUSK 23. YELLOW MAW OF TERROR 24. “FOR WANT OF A NAIL” 25. WINGS ABOVE THE WALLS 26. TRAITOR’S TURN 27. THE JOKE ON MAN 28. THE GREEN BEAST 29. AKKA—AND AFTER PROLOGUE The Man Who Remembered Tomorrow “Well, Doctor, what’s your verdict?” He sat up on the examination table, with the sheet wrapped around his bent and stringy frame, and firmly commanded my nurse to bring back his clothes. He looked at me, his bright blue eyes sharply curious and yet oddly unafraid—for I knew he expected a sentence of death. “Acquittal, John,” I told him honestly. “You’re really indestructible. Remarkable shape, for a man of your age—except for that knee. You’ll make me a good patient and a better chess opponent for the next twenty years.” But old John Delmar shook his weatherbeaten head, very seriously. “No, Doctor.” In that same tone of quiet and unexcited certainty, he might have said today was Tuesday. “No, Doctor, I’ve less than three weeks. I’ve known for several years that I’m going to die at eleven-seven on the morning of March 23, 1945.” “Nonsense,” I told him. “Not likely—unless you jump in front of a truck. That knee may always be a little stiff, but there’s certainly nothing else—” “I know the date.” His thin, old voice had a flat, impersonal conviction. “You see, I read it on a tombstone.” He didn’t seem to regard that statement as remarkable. “I came in this morning just to see if you can tell me what it is that I’m to die of.” He looked entirely too sane and cool to fall victim to any superstitious notion. “You can forget the idea of that,” I assured him heartily. “Physically, you’re sounder than most men twenty years younger. Except for that knee, and a few assorted scars—” “Please don’t think I want to question your diagnosis, but I’m really quite positive.” He seemed apologetic, and oddly hesitant. “You see, Doctor, I’ve an unusual—well, call it a gift. I’ve meant, some-tune, to tell you about it. That is, if you’d care to hear—” He paused, diffidently. I had wondered a long time, about old John Delmar. A faded, stiff little man, with thin gray hair and blue eyes that were curiously bright, strangely young. Still erect and agile, for all the years he owned to, he walked with a slight quick limp from that old bullet wound in his knee. We had first met when he came home from the war in Spain—he looked me up to bring me word of a friend of mine, not a third his age, who had died beside him, fighting with the Loyalists. I liked him. A lonely old soldier, he didn’t talk too much about his campaigns. We discovered a mutual interest in chess, and he made a pleasant companion. He had a youth of heart, an eager and unquenchable vitality, rare in a man so old. My medical interest, besides, was aroused by his durable physique. For he had endured many things. He had always been reticent. I was, I believe, his most intimate friend through those last, unwontedly peaceful years, yet he had given me no more than the barest hints of his long and remarkable life. He grew up, he told me, in the frontier West; he rode with a gun in a cattle war when he was only a boy, and somehow he got into the Texas Rangers a little short of the legal age. Later he served in the Rough Riders, and in the Boer War, and under Porfirio Diaz. In 1914 he joined the British Army—to make up, he said, for fighting the British in South Africa. Later he was in China and in the Rif, in the Gran Chaco and hi Spain. It was a Spanish prison camp that stiffened his bad knee. His hard-seasoned body began to fail him at last, and he finally came home, too old to fight again. That was when we met. I knew, too, that he was busy with some literary project—dropping in at his rather shabby rooms for a pipe and a game of chess, I had noticed his desk piled with closely written pages. Until he came to the office that morning in the spring of 1945, however, I had supposed that he was merely writing the memoirs of his colorful past. I had no inkling that his manuscripts dealt with recollections of the more wonderful future. Fortunately, no patient was waiting that morning, and his quiet air of matter-of-fact certainty about the moment of his death piqued my curiosity. When he was dressed again, I made him fill his pipe and told him that I’d be glad to hear. “It’s a good thing that most fighting men are killed before they get too old to fight,” he began a little awkwardly, settling back in his chair and easing his knee with thin, quivering hands. “That’s what I was thinking, one cold morning, the year this war began. “You remember when I came home to New York—or I called it coming home. But I found myself a stranger. Most people don’t have the time that you do, Doctor, for old fighting men. There was nothing for me to do. I was useless as a worn-out gun. That wet, gusty morning—it was April thirteenth, I remember—I sat down on a bench in Central Park, to think things over. I got cold. And I decided—well, that I’d already lived too long. “I was just getting up from the bench, to go back to the room and get my old automatic, when I—remembered! “That’s the only word I know. Memory. It seems a little strange, though, to speak of remembering things that haven’t happened yet. That won’t happen, some of them, for a thousand years and more. But there’s no other word. “I’ve talked to scientists about it, Doctor. A psychologist, first. A behaviorist. He laughed. It didn’t fit in, he said, with the concepts of behaviorism. A man, he said, is just a machine. Everything a man does is just mechanical reaction to stimulus. “But, if that’s so, there are stimuli that the behaviorists have never found. “There was another man who didn’t laugh. A physicist from Oxford, a lecturer on Einstein—relativity. He didn’t laugh. He seemed to believe what I told him. He asked questions about my— memories. But there wasn’t much I could tell him, then. “What he told me helped to ease my mind—the thing had had me worried. I wanted to talk about it to you, Doctor. But we were just getting to be good chess companions, and I didn’t want you to think me too odd. “Anyhow, this Oxford man told me that Space and Time aren’t real, apart. And they aren’t really different. They fade one into the other all around us. He spoke of the continuum and two-way time and a theory of the serial universe. I didn’t understand it all. But there’s no real reason, he said, why we shouldn’t remember the future—all of us. In theory, he said, our minds ought to be able to trace world-lines into the future, just as easily as into the past. “Hunches and premonitions and dreams, he believed, are sometimes real memories of things yet to come. I didn’t understand all he said, but he did convince me that the thing wasn’t—well, insanity. I had been afraid, Doctor. “He wanted to know more about what I—remembered. But that was years ago. It was just scattered impressions, then, most of them vague and confused. It’s a power, I think, that most people have to some degree—it simply happens to be better developed in me. I’ve always had hunches, some vague sense to warn me of danger— which is probably why I’m still alive. But the first clear memory of the future came that day in the park. And it was many months before I could call them up at will. “You don’t understand it, I suppose. I’ll try to describe that first experience, in the park. I slipped on the wet pavement, and fell back on the bench—I had got cold, sitting there, and I wasn’t so long back from Spain then, you know. “And suddenly I wasn’t in the park at all. “I was still falling, all right. I was in the same position—but no longer on the Earth. All around me was a weird plain. It was blazing with a glare of light, pitted with thousands of craters, ringed with mountains higher than any I had ever seen. The Sun was burning down out of a blue sky dark as midnight, and full of stars. There was another body in the heavens, huge and greenish. “A fantastic black machine was gliding down over those terrible mountains. It was larger than you’d think a flying machine could be, and utterly strange. It had just hit me with some weapon, and I was reeling back under the agony of the wound. Beside me was a great explosion of red gas. The cloud of it poured over me, and burned my lungs, and blotted out everything. “It was some time before I realized that I had been on the Moon —or rather that I had picked up the last thoughts of a man dying there. I had never had time for astronomy, but one day I happened to see a photograph of the lunar craters—and recognized t...
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