A Touch of Eternity by Clark Darlton

* * * *

The 2 pursuing torpedo ships had come closer. Rhodan again reduced his own velocity and gave the order to Pucky and Ras to make an immediate attack. The African took his raygun along. He knew what conditions to expect on board the Druuf ship and was fairly confident he could make it crash in a hurry. The spherical robots were relatively harmless and easy to overcome.

On the other hand, Pucky again declined to take a weapon with him. He was also convinced he could take care of the enemy.

Seconds before their teleport jump, something of grave import occurred at another location…

* * * *

“Master, they are becoming visible.”

The announcement came from the Druufs’ fleet commander whose ships were deployed around the light-ring in an effort to prevent the strangers from returning to their own time-plane. The Druuf who had been addressed as “Master” reacted in surprise.

“Visible? How are we supposed to take that? What do you mean?”

“They’re still faster than we are—about twice as fast. But now we can see them without reference to your viewscreen.”

“How do I appear to you?” asked the Druuf tensely.

“Normal and in the same relative time-rate.”

The Druuf breathed a sigh of relief. “Then it is the aliens who have been absorbed into our own time-plane,” he confirmed. “We have won. Keep the light-ring under bombardment so that they can’t get away. Now we will catch them alive in order to learn how they came into our sphere without losing their own time-rate initially. Take up their pursuit. I’ll shut off my equipment and go to normal ratio.”

“3 of my ships have been chasing the strangers. One of them has crashed.”

The Druuf pondered over this information. Then he said: “If the aliens will not cease their resistance, I shall bring the large ship into the attack. We shall continue in contact with each other.”

With a jerk of his massive limbs, he drew back on the flight lever. The velocity of the giant ship decreased rapidly. Slowly it approached the surface of the Crystal World…

* * * *

Pucky landed with a jolt on the hard metal deck of the corridor. He stood unmoving in order to listen but the ‘thump-drag-thump’ patter of robot feet was absent this time. They must not have noted his arrival. On the other hand he could be wrong: they might be lying in ambush somewhere already and waiting to jump on him.

It really didn’t happen very often that Pucky felt fear. Actually it wasn’t fear that suddenly came over him so much as it was an uncanny awareness of being alone. He wasn’t especially reassured by the knowledge that he could teleport to safety at any moment.

Somewhere down in the body of the metal ship, machinery was pounding and throbbing. Nobody could venture to guess what kind of propulsion system the Druufs had developed. Still it was to be assumed that they had attained to the speed of light and surpassed it; without that technical prerequisite there could be no interstellar space travel.

Pucky began to waddle softly along the passageway, ready in an instant to teleport to safety. His assignment was to incapacitate the ship, nothing more. In all probability there was no living creature other than himself on board, which made his task the simpler. But just the same…

One of the doors was standing open. It led into a large room which had the customary portholes in the walls instead of viewscreens. Pucky recognized the passing landscape of the Crystal World which was now no longer crystallized. Life down below had awakened from its relative paralysis. Not the slightest trace of difference was detectable now between his own motions and theirs.

The Sherbourne, flying farther ahead, could be made out clearly. The Druuf ship also slowed its flight so that both units could push onward at the same velocity. So the Druufs were holding off; they were not attacking any more.

Outside in the corridor he heard a humming sound, then something dragging or sliding. He made a single leap to one side and got behind the door. Was there someone on board after all—somebody who was not a robot?

A massive figure filled the doorframe and Pucky saw out of the corner of an eye that this apparition couldn’t possibly be one of the animated beach ball robots. This was something else.

He ducked back farther in order not to be seen immediately. It was not particularly bright in the room; the Druuf appeared to come from a world that circled an ancient sun. But aside from all that, what did it have to do with the robots?

The massive figure rolled into the room. Pucky knew that a robot did not necessarily have to walk or stroll in order to move itself forward. This one rolled on small wheels that had been installed under its torso or trunk. This trunk was almost rectangular in shape, having 4 limbs on each side and 2 more before and behind. It did not possess a head but in its place were 2 waving antennas with gold spheres at their tips which emitted a bluish glow. Pucky thought he felt something like a mild electric current that flowed through his body and caused a tingling sensation. Although this in itself was no direct danger, it undoubtedly gave warning of it.

The thing was a robot despite the fact that its actual function was not apparent at the moment. Now Pucky wasn’t so much in a hurry any more to make the ship crash. The robot interested him. How would it react when it became aware of him, Pucky?

Right now the thing was not aware of his presence.

The colossus rolled into the room and came to a stop in its centre. There it remained stationery and played its antennas back and forth. Were these its sense organs by means of which it saw and heard? On what basis did they work?

Pucky attempted to pick up some information from it by telepathic means but the results were as negative as they had been with the tinplated Humpty Dumpties. So then he tried it by means of psychokinesis.

His invisible mental currents reached for the unknown horror and held it tightly. Pucky could clearly sense that the robot was aware of the alien constraining force and that it was trying to move. But Pucky did not yield. At the same time he came out of hiding and padded slowly around the monster, ever ready to take flight but striving to find out where the thing’s front side might be.

It was not an easy thing to determine. A person is always tempted to look for a face no matter how strange another life form or creature may be. Even machines generally have some kind of a ‘face’ but this robot didn’t happen to have one.

The 12 arms of the thing gave no indication of their purpose. On the ends of the tentacles were little spherically shaped protrusions which could continuously change their shape with ease. Sometimes they looked like hands, sometimes like grasping tongs, then again like little spheres with stumpy outgrowths. Apparently the ‘hands’ were composed of a flexible material whose form and shape could be changed according to any desired purpose. This was an advanced technique that even the Arkonides didn’t know about.

Pucky attempted to influence or even restrict the incessant forming and changing of these surfaces but wasn’t entirely successful. Consequently he was also not able to prevent the sudden extrusion of a curious object on the end of the next arm in front of him, the purpose of which was not immediately clear to him.

It had a faint resemblance to a 4-pronged fork, the points of which were aimed at Pucky. The instrument did not look exactly like a weapon but it wasn’t a plaything, either. Pucky dodged slightly to one side while holding the robot’s arm tightly in his mutant’s grasp. But even his telekinetic faculties were incapable of influencing the sequence of events within the monster because he didn’t know how its mechanism functioned. So it was that the sudden electrical shock came somewhat as a surprise.

Pucky felt the fiery discharge race through his nervous system and strike at his brain. The resulting paralysis instantly froze his parapsychic capabilities. The robot was free. It turned around, softly humming, and rolled over to the motionless mouse-beaver.

Pucky couldn’t move. With a flash of horror the only thing he knew was that he had made the inexcusable mistake of underestimating an enemy.

Then he saw the 12 arms reach out and grasp him and he felt the hard pressure of imprisoning clamps.

* * * *

Ras Tschubai was considerably more fortunate in his undertaking.

When he materialized he was rewarded for having concentrated on the Command Central of the Druuf ship. He stood directly behind the 3 spherical robots and was in a position to destroy them with a single shot from his impulse beamer before they could move or become aware of his presence. Before Ras proceeded to systematically destroy the control room, he decided to make a tour through the ship.

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