Collision with Chronos

12

The sun was setting on a dusty yellowish landscape broken only by bare, bone-like trees and scattered houses of brick or mud. Rond Heshke, sitting on a verandah backed by a neat bungalow of red brick, looked upon the scene with an unexpected feeling of calm and peace.

Herrick, the Amhrak who owned the bungalow in which Heshke, Sobrie and Layella were staying, came walking toward the building with easy strides, his body swinging characteristically, and Heshke found that even the sudden sight of a full-blooded dev didn’t upset his contentment.

At first it had been a tremendous shock to him. He’d been angry and bewildered that he, a respectable citizen with a certificate of racial purity, could be summarily packed off to a dev reservation. His protests had been ignored and he’d gathered that it was because of his friendship with the Oblomot family. After all, Sobrie was being banished too, simply because of his association with Layella. Yes, it had been shocking, at first, to be thrown in with the Amhraks. Had not his experiences with the Chinks already prepared him to some degree, he was sure he might have gone insane.

But now… Herrick mounted the steps of the verandah. He was wholly, unstintingly Amhrak. He had the red skin, the compact, round head, the round eyes and the foreign, big-lobed ears. His body, too, had all the disturbing oddness of proportion and of lank, too-easy movement. And it didn’t bother Heshke at all. It seemed entirely natural for him to accept Herrick as a charming member of a charming people – all the more so, perhaps, because they represented a now dying culture.

“Hello, Rond,” Herrick said with a heavy Amhrak accent. “Is Sobrie in?”

Heshke nodded and Herrick swept inside without the usual pleasantries. Heshke continued looking at the receding sun, reflecting on how well the surviving Amhraks had adapted to their circumstances. There were three million of them on this reserve, which measured about two hundred miles across (and yet they had once populated two continents). Most of the land was as Heshke saw it now, arid and useless for cultivation, but the Amhraks had solved that by turning to hydroponics. They had organised themselves into a comprehensive little community, with several small-to-middling towns, and had resurrected a modest amount of industry – all small-scale, just enough for their needs. They were all very much aware that their existence was contingent upon the whim of their conquerors.

While Heshke had known that the Amhraks were technically advanced, he’d always thought this to be due to their copying the inventions of True Man, and it had surprised him, while staying with Herrick, to discover how inventive they were in their own right. Herrick often reminisced about the Amhrak war, when he’d been a young scientist working for the Amhrak’s last attempt at defence. He’d been involved, typically, in a project that never reached fruition – a force screen to ward off nuclear warheads.

“The reason why you Whites were able to win,” he’d told Heshke (Whites being the Amhrak term for True Man), “is that you have such a capacity for submitting to a central authority, which makes you able to organise yourselves all in one direction. Our social organisation was too loose to be able to stand up to you. Even at the end our energies were being dissipated in countless uncoordinated projects.”

“I can’t accept that explanation,” Heshke had objected. “What about the Lorenes?”

“True, the Lorenes had this ability to an ever greater degree. But then, we helped you to defeat the Lorenes. You wouldn’t have done it alone.”

And to that Heshke had no answer. It was strange, talking to someone whose picture of history didn’t follow the Titan version of True Man versus the rest. In official histories, past alliances with other subspecies were always played down, and it was never admitted that they could have been important for the outcome. True Man had saved himself unaided, so the text ran, from numerous horrible enemies.

Heshke had soon ceased to battle with contending concepts; it was a relief to be away from it all.

Sometimes he watched Herrick as the Amhrak tinkered, using whatever components he could get his hands on, with an old project of his that had been interrupted by the war: television without any transmitter or camera, only a receiver. Herrick had discovered that by means of a long-range interference technique light-waves could be converted, at a distance, into radio or UHF waves, and these could then be picked up at the control station. In other words it was possible to snatch pictures out of thin air from hundreds of miles away. Heshke would sit with Herrick for hours while he fiddled with his crackling apparatus, occasionally getting a fuzzy, briefly recognisable picture of a mountaintop or a stretch of ocean. There was little control over where the pictures came from, as this apparently depended on the Earth’s magnetic field.

The sun slipped down the horizon. Heshke began to feel cold. He got up, stretched himself, and went inside.

Herrick and Sobrie were seated at a table, both looking grim and sober – Sobrie more so, Heshke thought. He looked up as the archaeologist came in.

“Bads news, I’m afraid, Rond.” He gestured to Herrick. “We’ve just heard from Pradna.”

“You can still do that?”

Sobrie nodded. “In the past few weeks we’ve been able to pick up with whatever remnants of the League survived the mass defection to the Titans. Slowly, they’re putting themselves together again and thanks to that we still have contacts inside the administration.”

He paused. Heshke, in fact, had been impressed by how easily Sobrie had been able to make arrangements for them in Amhrak country. The Panhumanic League’s networks apparently extended right into most of the dev reservations; Herrick himself was involved in it.

“Limnich has ordered all reservations to be terminated,” Sobrie said quietly. “It’s the end of the road for the Amhraks, for all of us.”

“We always knew it would happen sooner or later,” Herrick said without bitterness. “All we can do is accept it.”

Heshke, too, had suspected that this might be coming on.

He reached into his pocket and took out the little communicator Su-Mueng had given him. That young man might have had some intimation of what was impending, too. How else to explain his embarrassed, evasive manner at their last meeting, when he’d urged Heshke to use the communicator and leave Earth?

Su-Mueng had obviously managed to worm his way into the Titans’ good books somehow. He’d waved away Heshke’s concern for his safety; he had an understanding with Limnich, he’d said vaguely; he was doing important work for him. What an improbable partnership, Heshke told himself.

He placed the communicator on the table. “You can get out of here,” he said to Sobrie. “Go to that space city I told you about. They’ll receive you; they’re very hospitable.”

“Like a rat leaving a sinking ship? No, I don’t think so. You should go, naturally, Rond. You’ve no cause to be here in the first place.”

“No, I’m staying behind,” Heshke said with a sigh. “Not out of any sense of heroism, but because this insane world has given me too much of a spin as it is. Things have been much too hectic for me lately; I was growing more and more tired by the day. This reservation’s the only place I’ve been able to rest, and I like it here.”

“Rond is right,” Herrick rumbled, “if you have a way of escape you should take it, Sobrie. Not necessarily for your sake, but for Layella’s. It would be false heroism to sacrifice her, too, when she’s entirely innocent.”

Yes, Layella… Sobrie pondered. “Couldn’t we take some Amhraks off, too?” he suggested shyly. “A few… breeding pairs?”

Herrick shook his head, smiling with bittersweet amusement. “Lonely survivors of a vanished race? No one would be found to fill the role. We’ve long been accustomed to the idea of species death.”

“I’ll write out a report,” Heshke said, “and you can be an envoy to Retort City for Su-Mueng and myself. They ought to be told what Limnich’s answer is, anyway.”

“I wish you’d come too.”

“No, I’m finished with gadding about through space and time. Having to die doesn’t worry me; I’m just going to relax and enjoy being alive until the Titans get here.”

The vast cavern complex echoed and thundered to the clatter and roar of machinery. Limnich, looking on the scene from the manager’s gallery, nodded with satisfaction. So far his inspection tour of the thirteen main installations involved in Operation Century had proved the efficiency of his administration.

His eye swept over the progress reports, abstracting with skill the salient figures. “I see that, starting from baseline, you’re twelve per cent ahead of schedule,” he commented.

The manager, a rough-looking individual with a hard, lumpy face, was standing stiffly by his side. “That’s right, Planetary Leader,” he said, pride edging into his voice.

“I’ll expect the same rate of progress, namely a twelve per cent increase over projected output – plus your current output – during the next identical period.”

“That represents an exponential increase in production, Leader. But if the materials and components arrive as ordered—”

“They will,” Limnich told him curtly. He’d found that demanding the near-impossible frequently produced miracles.

Followed by his entourage, he went with the manager the length of the gallery and passed through a tunnel to an adjoining series of caverns: one of the training grounds of the Legions of Kronos. They walked past row after row of sleek time-travelling war machines, each projecting from its launcher as if eager to depart for the future.

From ahead came hoarse shouts and stamping of feet as men were put through the drill designed by psychologists to bring the nervous system to a peak of alertness. Titan-Colonel Brask met Limnich at the entrance to the drill cavern, saluted, and then turned to bellow commands, forming the squads into open-order ranks and standing them to attention. Limnich took his time over the inspection, pausing at nearly every man to look him over, glancing at the special gadgets of the time-combat kits they wore. Meanwhile, from yet another cavern came a massive fuzzy roaring noise: the sound of scores of time travellers warming up.

Finally he pronounced himself satisfied. Brask escorted him to the third cavern where the crews stood by their machines in readiness for the demonstration. At a signal from Brask they filed aboard. Moments later the fuzzy racket intensified and the time travellers all vanished together, fading away to go hurtling in formation through non-time.

“Impressive,” said Limnich. “Very impressive.”

“It will be even more impressive when they arrive in enemy time loaded to capacity with hydrogen bombs,” Brask said with incisive satisfaction.

Brask took the Planetary Leader to his office to discuss various details. While they were there the vidcom rang with a message for Limnich.

The yellow face of the dev Chink, Hueh Su-Mueng, came up on the screen. Only a faint habitual expression of distaste came to Brask’s features, and none at all to Limnich’s.

“It appears that your ploy has worked, leader,” Su-Mueng said. “My instruments tell me Retort City’s ship sent down a lighter to the Amhrak reservation, and now has left orbit.”

“So soon?” mused Limnich. “But my tip-off can’t even have reached Heshke yet. There must be other information pipelines at work—either that or he couldn’t stomach life on the reservation!” He smiled unpleasantly.

“I presume that nothing further need delay the expedition?”

“No, I’ll issue the requisite orders.” The remaining work to be done should only take a week or two, he thought. The drive-units had already been constructed to the Chink’s design, and now could be ferried into space to be fitted to the interplanetary spaceships that had been prepared to take them. The men, the weapons, the organisation, were all ready.

It should be a grand adventure, Limnich told himself. He almost wished he could go along.

Herrick had brought in a tape that had appeared on the reconstituted network somehow.

“It shows the closing down of the Bugel reservation,” he said to Heshke, a little apologetically. “You needn’t watch it if you’d rather not.”

“Please go ahead,” Heshke told him, though with a tightening in his stomach.

Herrick put the tape on the playback. “This didn’t come through the usual channels,” he said. “In fact it looks as if it might be a plant.”

“A plant?”

“Yes. The Titans might have wanted us to see it.”

The tape came to life, feeding the screen a long, roughly edited succession of sequences from the cameras of the official recordists, without any proper order or commentary. After a few minutes Heshke found himself wanting to close his eyes.

The landscape was not unlike the one outside his door: dusty and bare. As the Titan units advanced into it their half-tracks sent up clouds of dust which drifted in from the horizon.

The Bugels were a copper-skinned, pigmy-like people of a comparatively low cultural standing – little more than savages, in fact. Never very numerous, their reservation was a small one. They ran hither and thither before the implacable Titan vehicles, facing their end without dignity but with much excitement and terror.

The Titans herded the Bugels into compounds. They were given injections or else shot, and buried in lime pits.

Heshke imagined the same happening here – the clouds of dust as the exterminators rolled forward (during the wars, when operating behind the lines in dev-populated territory, they’d been known as SMD’s – Special Measure Detachments), the compounds, the clerks checking off names against endless lists (though with the Bugels those lists covered only the noble families), the medics giving the injections and the doctors signing death certificates.

From the looks on their faces, the Titans plainly didn’t relish their work. They regarded it as unpleasant, distressing – but necessary. It would have been worse if they’d been killing people; but these were only verminous animals.

Why on Earth had the Titans sent the tape into the Amhrak reservation, Heshke wondered? – if in fact they had, as Herrick suspected. To taunt? To strike fear? Perhaps it was an act of nastiness on the part of some hate-filled official.

Herrick was watching the tape placidly, smoking a tobacco roll, as if he were thinking of something else.