Collision with Chronos Page 6

  His last words were a shout, an excited squawk. The Absolute Present register had zeroed in and stood slightly on the other side of zero.

  Ascar turned a knob, tuning the windows to transparency. “Take a look,” he said. “We’re at time-stop.”

  Slowly Heshke rose and approached one of the windows.

  It was Earth, but it was not Earth. The sky was blue, with white clouds hanging majestically in it. The sun was of a familiar size, colour and radiance. But there the resemblance ended. True, there was grass – green grass … but it was an olive green shot through with mother-of-pearl colours, and all the other vegetation was distinctly non-Terran; the trees – twisted, writhing things – bore no resemblance to any Earth tree that had ever existed as far as Heshke knew.

  These trees, growing on the slope of a grassy eminence where Ascar had set them down, did not detain his attention for long. Briefly he noted an unrecognisable flying thing, frozen in midair as had been the raven, and then he flooded his vision with the incredible scene that was set out below.

  The Hathar Ruins: but not the ruins that Heshke had studied for so many years, and not those still further back down the centuries. This was the Hathar site as it had been in its prime: an intact, inhabited settlement. He drank in the clean-cut, sparkling conical towers, the large buildings, the Cathedral (whose purpose he still did not know), the tenement-like masses of smaller rooms, the plazas, the roads. …

  It was all as he had constructed it in his imagination so many times. Alien, but alive. A bustling, living habitation of a nonhuman people.

  And those people thronged Hathar. Furry, sharp-snouted, standing in triangular doorways and walking the streets and squares. But they were caught in mid-motion like a stereo still photograph: the traveller was not moving in any direction in time.

  “The alien interventionists!” breathed the Titan officer. Both he and Heshke had forgotten their tacit agreement to jump Ascar.

  “Correct. But they are not interventionists, though they are alien in a sense.”

  The Titan clenched his fists. “So we have been mistaken all along. The enemy is attacking from the future. That must be where he made his landings on Earth.”

  “No, no,” said Ascar, adopting a tone of uncharacteristic patience. “Watch this: I’m putting us in motion again at the biological rate of one second per second.”

  He made an adjustment. The scene came to life. The clouds sailed across the sky, the trees moved, the aliens walked through streets and squares.

  “They’re walking backward,” said Heshke blankly.

  And so indeed they were. The whole scene was like a motion picture thrown into reverse. “That’s because we’ve adopted the time sense normal to us,” Ascar explained, “but it’s not normal to them. Now watch what happens when I put our machine into reverse at the same rate – one second per second.”

  Again he made an adjustment. They all watched through the windows while the scene rewound itself and went forward, the alien creatures walking naturally this time, with a rolling gait, their posture not quite as erect as that of a human being. “This is their normal time-sense,” Ascar told them, “the reverse of ours. Now do you get it? These creatures aren’t alien to Earth. They’re Terran. They evolved here, millions of years in our future. By the same token, we are in their future. The Earth has two completely different evolutionary developments on it, separated in time and associated with separate time-streams – time-streams moving in opposite directions. And they are on a collision course.”

  The shock that affected Heshke and the Lieutenant, once they understood this news, lasted some time. They stared for long moments without speaking.

  “But the Earth Mother,” the Titan stuttered.

  Ascar gave a harsh laugh. “Earth Mother!” He made the words sound like a curse.

  Heshke turned to Ascar and gestured with his thumb through the window. “Aren’t we too exposed? What if they see us?”

  “They can’t see us. We’re not synched on their present moment; we’re pacing a few minutes behind it.”

  “Collision!” gasped the Titan. “It’s inconceivable! What will happen, Ascar?”

  Ascar laughed again, this time horribly and savagely. “Can’t you envisage it? The converging time processes are now only four hundred years apart, and already we’ve become aware of one another. Each will make massive preparations to destroy the other.” His eyes shone, as though he were privy to some dreadful vision. “And while the time-waves are yet centuries apart an indescribable war of annihilation will be in progress. Each civilisation, on seeing the constructions of the other rising magically in its midst, on seeing them become newer with each passing year, will grow more and more fearful. Both sides will find themselves trying to manipulate the same materials from different points in time! But everything will be in vain – for what will happen when the two time-streams actually collide? Can anything survive such a shock? Annihilation, that’s what will happen. Annihilation, followed by the cessation of all time. …”

  With an effort the Titan broke free from the spell of Ascar’s words. He drew himself erect.

  “There’s no time to lose: the High Command must be made aware of the situation immediately.”

  “Yes, that’s where our duty lies.” Ascar was trembling with nervous reaction. He drew back from the pilot’s seat, leaving his gun where it was, and wiped his brow with a shaky hand. “Take over, Lieutenant.”

  The Titan seated himself at the control panels and made calibrations. He appeared to have recovered his composure completely and spoke with authoritative self-righteousness.

  “It has to be admitted that you’ve rendered mankind a service, Citizen Ascar. Nevertheless when we return to Absolute Present you will be charged with disobeying orders and with murdering a Titan officer.”

  “Leave him alone, for God’s sake,” Heshke pleaded worriedly. “Can’t you see he’s insane?”

  “Yes, insane,” muttered Ascar. “Who wouldn’t be … five years alone in that place. Who wouldn’t be? The strain … knowing I was the only man on Earth who could solve the problem … who could give humanity the secret of time travel … I wasn’t sure I could do it. The enemy had an advantage over us. We had to take away that advantage or perish … now we’re going to perish anyway.”

  The fuzzy hum of the time traveller rose in volume as the machine picked up power and glided away from its position to go surging pastward. Heshke settled down for the journey, reassured by seeing the tall Titan once more at the controls and by Ascar’s apparent lapse into inactivity.

  For about an hour they journeyed in silence. Heshke began to doze, but was awakened by a hoarse cry from the pilot, accompanied by a sickening lurch. The pilot was taking evasive action.

  Heshke observed that the Absolute Present register was again flickering. The pilot cleared the windows to transparency to reveal the shape of a pursuing enemy time machine. Ascar shouted incoherently; at the same time they sustained a shuddering shock and seemed to go into a kind of spin.

  Heshke became dizzy. When his head cleared the cabin was motionless, but leaning crazily, and a large hole had been torn in its side. Behind them the drive-unit gave out a ragged, injured buzz.

  Somehow it came as a surprise to Heshke to find that the alien time traveller had been armed.

  “Damn!” moaned Ascar. “Damn!”

  Heshke got to his feet. The Titan officer was already peering out of the smoking hole in the side of the cabin. Heshke joined him and saw, in midair, a cylindrical shape half materialise, shimmering, and then fade away again. He shrank back momentarily; then, when the officer stepped cautiously to the ground, he followed him and stood staring around.

  If death was the absence of life, then Heshke had never imagined such an expanse of death. The landscape stretched all around them in a grey, sterile tableland, featureless except for some hills in the west and some tumbled ruins to the north. There was not a blade of grass nor anything that moved. And dust, eve
rywhere dust – Heshke had never conceived of so much dust, unless it was on the surface of the moon.

  Ascar scrambled out of the cabin after them, his face gone ghastly pale. “The drive’s ruined!” he exclaimed in a strangled tone. “That bastard knew exactly where to aim for!”

  His glance darted around helplessly. “You asked me about the future, Heshke – well, here it is. The future that time hasn’t reached yet. And we’re stranded in it!”

  That was what he was afraid of, Heshke thought.

  “We’ve failed,” said the Lieutenant in a stricken voice. “Our comrades will never hear our report now.”

  “It doesn’t matter, you fool,” Ascar snarled. “Life on Earth has exactly two centuries to run – then everything’s finished.”

  Blood and soil, Heshke thought. Blood and soil.

  They all stood staring at the dead landscape.

  5

  Far from earth, the ISS – Interstellar Space Society – known to its inhabitants as Retort City floated as if transfixed in the blackness of space, approximately mid-way between Altair and Barnard’s Star – that is, as far from any celestial body as it could manage. It took its name from its appearance, which was that of a double retort, or hourglass, but long and elegantly shaped. Retort City was, in fact, a city in a bottle, its outer skin being transparent and having a glassy sheen. An observer watching from the void would have discerned within the glass envelope a sort of double spindle, this being the general plan of the city’s internal structure, and would have seen through a muted blaze of lights an intermittent movement as the internal transport facilities passed up and down.

  The city had a history of about five thousand years, having lived it uneventfully for the most part. Probably, its rulers thought, there were other ISS establishments somewhere within a hundred light-year radius of Sol, all surviving fragments of long-vanished Earth civilisations, for at one time the idea of forsaking life on planetary bodies and taking to artificial cities in the interstellar void had been a fashionable one. But they did not know this for sure, and felt no urge to comb space for their lost cousins.

  Colloquially the two halves of the ISS were known as the Lower Retort and the Upper Retort – terms with social, rather than spatial implications. Officially they were the Production Retort and Leisure Retort. And no one, except newborn babes, ever passed from one retort to the other.

  Or almost no one.

  Hueh Su Mueng shut down his machine and stood for a few moments looking abstractedly around him at the work area: a large, spacious hall filled with rows of machines, some like his own, some different. The next shift was already beginning to wander in; some of the men stood around chatting, others looked over their spec sheets or started up their machines, already becoming absorbed in their work.

  Most of Su-Mueng’s shift had already gone. He was about to follow them when a young man, a few years older than himself, stopped by with a smile.

  “Hello, Su-Mueng. There’s nothing much doing in my section today. Got anything you’d like me to be getting on with?”

  Su-Mueng hesitated. He had been finding his current job interesting and had intended returning tomorrow to continue it – had, in fact, been postponing the final stage of his other project so as to be able to complete it. He glanced down at the half finished assembly of finely-machined components: a new type of calibrator for some unguessable instrument wanted in the Upper Retort.

  “Oh, all right. You can carry on with this,” he said resignedly. He pulled out the spec sheets and explained the details and where he’d got to. “There’s no hurry,” he added. “Deadline’s more than a month away.”

  The other man nodded, looking eagerly over the work. “It’s always like that on these slow cycles. I hate it when we’re so slack.”

  Su-Mueng walked away and discarded his work-gown in the locker room, washing his hands and face and using a refresher spray on himself. The hormone-laden mist settled on his skin and in his nostrils, making him feel fresher and brighter and washing away the weariness that comes from long hours of effort.

  Then he strode away and down spiral staircases to the elevators, a slim, elegant youth. His mind began to buzz with thoughts and the excitement of his secret rebellion … but in the elevator that sped towards his domestic level he encountered Li Kim, an old friend he knew from training school, who pressed him to enjoy a short game of ping-pong. Not being able to think of a good reason to refuse, Su-Mueng left the elevator with him and they proceeded together to the nearest recreation hall.

  Kim invoked two cans of beer from a dispenser and handed Su-Mueng one. They strolled through a gallery of gaming machines, then past the entrances to the theatres. Further on there was a thumping noise against the wall from some fast-action physical game in progress – batball, most likely.

  Ping-pong, Su-Mueng thought. That’s what we get down here. They don’t play ping-pong in the Upper Retort. By Almighty Time, the games they play there!

  But even ping-pong, the way it was played in Retort City, was interesting enough, workers’ game or no. They secured a table and Su-Mueng took up his bat. The table was concave, like a wide, shallow bowl, divided by a thin screen of aluminium. Li Kim drained his beer, grinned, took up the ball and served.

  They sent the ball ricocheting back and forth a few times. Kim was good, as Su-Mueng had discovered on many past occasions. The curved surface, of course, made a quick eye and hand all the more necessary; but that was not all.

  Su-Mueng almost missed a return, just caught it, and hammered the ball over the left-hand side of the screen.

  On crossing the divide it vanished in midair.

  Kim vanished, too. But an instant later the ball came rocketing back at Su-Mueng and Kim, also, sprang back into view at the centre of the table.

  This development demonstrated the speciality of Retort City: the ability to manipulate time. The table was divided into time-zones each of whose present moment was marginally out of phase with the others. More than quick reflexes were required – one needed to be almost psychic to anticipate where the ball would be returned from, or when. The phases could be adjusted so as to give a longer or shorter time difference, or more esoterically, rotated so that, for instance, the ball would be returned to the left and mysteriously come back from the right. It was even possible for the ball to be returned before it had been delivered.

  And it was easy for the workmen of the Lower Retort to be technically extravagant with such toys. Technology was, after all, their life.

  Kim was in fine form, flashing in and out of existence faster than Su-Mueng could follow or anticipate him. He might have done better if his mind had been on the game, but as it was his moves were confused with other thoughts. Kim won the first match and stood grinning at him.

  “Same again?”

  Su-Mueng laid down his bat. “Some other time, maybe. I don’t think it’s an even contest the way I’m playing today.”

  “Time-chess then? Each row on a different time gradient?”

  Su-Mueng shook his head. Time-chess required such concentration, such a phenomenal memory, that he wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  “Oh. You want to relax more, maybe? A show? Or some girls?”

  “Thanks, Kim, but there’s something I want to attend to at home. I think I’ll be getting along.”

  “Sure. Don’t let me stop you. Well, in that case I’ll be getting along, too.”

  Kim waved him a cheery good-bye and went bounding toward the gaudy awning of a trampoline emporium. Su-Mueng left the leisure area and continued on his way home.

  Kim could never understand, he thought, what was on his mind. And his intentions would have left him aghast. Probably no one but himself could understand, and that went for either side of the divided city. People never did understand what was outside their experience, and for everyone but himself the other retort up – or, in the reverse case, down – the shaft was little more than a theoretical concept. …

  The elevator swept d
own, past endless tiers of factories and workshops, past amusement emporiums and domestic precincts. Finally Su-Mueng left the elevator and made his way through a maze of tiny streets until he came to a neat little house merging with a dozen others in a jumbled, interlocking design. He put his thumbprint to the key and went inside.

  His grandfather sat at a table drinking a glass of fizzy mineral water. He was not really so very much older than Su-Mueng (so demonstrating another aspect of Retort City’s mastery over time); to be precise he was twenty-six years older.

  Su-Mueng gave him a perfunctory greeting, drew a meal from the dispenser, sat down and began to eat the synthesised rice, curried chicken and bamboo shoots.

  “Interesting job today?” his grandfather asked, eyeing him speculatively. Su-Mueng nodded abstractedly. “Not bad.” It still surprised him, even ten years after, how much casual conversation in the Lower Retort centred on work. The social system really did function as it was meant to: everybody down here had an obsessive interest in production, in making things. He was interested, too – after all, it was interesting – but with him that was not all. He did not neglect the wider vision that was denied to these … servants. …

  He shovelled down the food and sat back, brooding. His grandfather switched on the wall screen. A technician was explaining how to set up a time delay circuit – a circuit that really did delay time, running a tiny fraction of the travelling “now” through a recurrent phase. Su-Mueng, already familiar with the technique, looked on without interest. Later there would be crude dramas, comedy shows, and so forth.

  His resentment welled up. “You should see the kind of thing they screen in the Upper Retort,” he suddenly said, loudly.

  With a faint groan his grandfather turned to him, smiling derisively. “You’re not going to start that again, are you?”