Collision with Chronos

13

Shiu Kung-Chien and his able assistant Leard Ascar had nearly finished setting up the all-sense transmitter when the vidphone at the other end of the observatory tinkled. A cybernetic servitor rolled forward with the screen, on which the face of Prime Minister Hwen Wu looked out.

“Forgive the intrusion,” Hwen Wu apologised, “but a matter of greatest urgency has arisen. Evidently our posting that young man Hueh Su-Mueng to Earth, so as to end his ‘awkward presence’ here, so to speak, has misfired. He has returned with an invasion fleet.”

“I take it you refer to those lumpish vessels which have been hovering outside my observatory window for the past hour,” Shiu replied with a trace of exasperation. “I had thought they were part of your own improvident plans. Fortunately they appear to rely on reaction motors for close manoeuvring and are no longer jamming our instruments.”

“They’re entirely the work of Hueh Shao’s son and his new friends,” Hwen Wu assured him. “That family seems capable of endless mischief. The invaders have discharged four ship-loads of men through the dock, which they now control, and are rapidly discharging the rest. Haven’t you heard the rumpus? They’re proving quite destructive.”

“Yes, I’ve been aware of an undignified amount of noise and have several times sent out requests for it to be diminished,” Shiu said acidly. “Why are you calling me about it?”

“Well, you’re a cabinet minister,” Hwen Wu pointed out. “I feel we should meet to dicuss the situation. Hueh Su-Mueng has sent a message demanding our unconditional surrender.”

The Prime Minister’s words were punctuated by a low, distant roar: the sound of an explosion.

“Very well,” Shiu consented resignedly. “I’ll come at once.”

He turned to Ascar as the servitor rolled away with the vid-phone. “This really is tiresome,” he complained. “Are your countrymen accustomed to behaving like this?”

“I’m afraid so,” Ascar said laconically.

“Barbarians!” muttered Shiu.

“May I continue in your absence?” Ascar asked politely.

“Yes, of course… you understand everything?”

“Yes, thanks to an unexampled teacher.”

Shiu Kung-Chien departed. Ascar, impatient to get on with it, continued checking the work of the servitors, carefully scanning the streams of calligraphic ideograms that came up on the monitor.

It was damned good to get away from desk-work. He’d been hungering for action for some time.

Titan-Major Brourne stood in a large concourse, a sort of intricate plaza, watching the flood of men, materials and weapons that came surging in a disciplined operation through the docking ports. The flowers and shrubs, the miniature trees and tinted screens, had all been trampled down and cast aside to make way for the traffic, which was heading deeper into the space city. The immediate area was solidly secured, ringed by heavy machine guns and even light cannon, and hour by hour came reports of whole districts taken without any show of resistance.

At this rate the whole city would be in his hands in a day.

Already he’d made an excursion into the occupied areas and everything he saw confirmed his instincts. It was exactly as he would have expected: decadence, nothing but decadence. Decadent art, decadent science, decadent customs. The Chinks were effete, ultra-sophisticated, wallowing in sensual pleasure – the whole city was simply an orgy of effeminate prettiness. And the people didn’t seem to know how to react to the invasion. They had none of the rude, healthy vigour that made True Man great.

Brourne strode to a small building near the ports where he had set up his field HQ. Hueh Su-Mueng sat looking over a complicated map he’d prepared of the city. As the reports came in he was marking more and more of it in blue, his code for “taken”.

The plan of operations was largely his brainchild. His idea was to have the whole city under control before the masters of the Leisure Retort could gather their wits sufficiently to take any effective action. He was striking down toward the bottleneck joining the two retorts, so as to cut off any retreat in that direction or any orders for weapons that might be given to the workers. Once the Leisure Retort had been seized he’d been promised that he himself could take a small force of Titans into the Production Retort. He hoped for a good response from its inhabitants to his news.

“All in order?” Brourne rapped.

Su-Mueng nodded, looking up at the stubby, barrel-like man. “We’re keeping to our timetable remarkably well.”

“Too well,” Brourne rumbled sulkily. “I like the opposition to put up a bit of a fight.”

Su-Mueng ignored the remark and continued studying the map, wondering where Hwen Wu and the rest of the cabinet were.

A Titan sergeant appeared at the door and saluted smartly. “We’ve found a white man, sir.”

Brourne turned with interest, but the man who stood there flanked by two troopers was unknown to him. He was a tall, slim man, his eyes steady, wearing garments of an unfamiliar cut – basically Earth style, but probably tailored here in the space city, Brourne imagined.

“Who are you?” he barked.

The other paused before answering in a low tone. “My name is Citizen Sobrie Oblomot.”

The Titan-Major glared at him, then decided on a less threatening posture. “Well, it’s certainly a change to find a white man in a place like this,” he said briskly. “How did you come to be here?”

“A Chink ship brought me,” Oblomot told him. “From the Amhrak reservation.”

“Amhrak? Are you an Amhrak?” Brourne was startled, almost indignant. “Frankly I wouldn’t have known it—”

“No, I’m not Amhrak. I was banished there for… political reasons.”

“Oh, I see.” Brourne grimaced. “As a matter of fact, my men were expecting to find Rond Heshke, the archaeologist, when they brought you in. Presumably he was on the ship too?”

“No…” Oblomot said slowly. “Rond stayed behind.”

Brourne looked disappointed.

Dismally Sobrie’s eyes took in the scene in Brourne’s HQ. It depressed him, having thought he’d escaped the Titans for good, to see them come pouring into Retort City as well. For a moment he’d had the crazy idea that they were taking over the universe.

His first thought had been for Layella. Even in Retort City costume she stood out a mile. But a group of women had taken care of her and hidden her somewhere. With luck the Titans wouldn’t notice her for some time.

For some reason he hadn’t tried to flee himself. Probably, he rationalised, he’d become infected with Rond Heshke’s style of defeatism.

The young officer at the table turned around and spoke to the Titan-Major. It was, Sobrie realised with a start, Hueh Su-Mueng – wearing Titan uniform! The spectacle of a full-blooded Chink dressed out as a Titan-Lieutenant made Sobrie burst into laughter.

Brourne silenced him with a scowl and lumbered over to glance at the map. His troops had reached the centre of the city – of this half of the city, at any rate. Even if its rulers tried to organise some sort of defence it would do them no good now.

“Excellent, excellent,” he murmured. “Well, there it is, then. The job’s practically done.”

Su-Mueng rose to his feet and spoke respectfully. “Now that matters have reached this stage, Major, may I request that I lead a force into the Lower Retort, to assess the situation there?”

The Titan laughed brutally. “Sit tight, Chink, you’re not going anywhere.”

Alarm showed on Su-Mueng’s yellow features. “I don’t understand, Major. Planetary Leader Limnich made a firm promise—”

“We don’t do deals with devs,” Brourne sneered. “Sometimes they come in useful, like animals come in useful. You’ve done your job, and thanks very much.” He jerked his head to two huge guards at the back of the room, who promptly strode forward and stamped to attention on either side of Su-Mueng.

The boy’s a simpleton, Sobrie thought. He really didn’t know what sort of people he was mixing with. He probably doesn’t understand, even now, what racism means.

And Su-Mueng did, indeed, look bewildered, like a child who’s been cheated.

“This – this is outright treachery!” he spluttered breathlessly, swaying as though about to faint. “When Limnich hears—”

“Limnich, Limnich!” Brourne jeered. He laughed again, loudly. “After you left, Limnich had his office fumigated!”

“You need me to get cooperation in the Lower Retort —”

“The Lower Retort will get the same treatment this one is getting – and soon.” He would have moved into the Production Retort first, in fact, except that there was no dock there for the spaceships. Still, Brourne didn’t anticipate any trouble. The masters are gutless, he thought. The slaves must be even worse.

“If you have any further role to play, it will be as an interpreter,” he told Su-Mueng. “We’ll probably need a few of those.”

He gestured to the guards. “Take him in custody. This fellow Oblomot, too. I’ll decide what to do with him later.”

Su-Mueng stood blankly for a moment. Then he did an astonishing thing. He took one step to the rear and both hands went smoothly up to both men’s necks. The troopers jerked momentarily, then fell back, unconscious.

The lithe youth bounded forward to meet the party escorting Sobrie. His hands seemed scarcely to touch them, merely weaving in and out in a graceful arabesque. But the soldiers were caught up in that arabesque, tumbling in a flurry of limbs until they finished up dazed on the other side of the room.

The people of the Upper Retort practised the arts and all mental pleasures; those of the Lower Retort practised sport. Su-Mueng was using Hoka, the culmination of thousands of years’ development of unarmed combat. Compared with the enthusiasts in the Production Retort Su-Mueng was but a beginner, but he could stun – or, though that was forbidden, kill – with but a light touch upon a nerve, and in his hands an untrained man’s body was but an assemblage of self-destructive levers.

Brourne’s gun was in his hand. Su-Mueng too drew his own Corgel automatic in one easy movement – the Titans, treating his honorary rank as one huge joke, had delighted in fitting him out with all accoutrements, including an “honorary certificate of racial purity”– and bent forward in a supple stance, bringing his gun hand forward to shoot the Major carefully in the arm. Brourne swung away, cursing with pain.

Su-Mueng put a hand between Sobrie’s shoulder blades and propelled him through the door. Sobrie, surrendering his will, ran with him across the plaza toward the stream of guns and vehicles that bounced across the occasionally uneven flooring.

Glancing behind him, Sobrie saw Brourne struggle to the door, leaning against the jamb. Su-Mueng threw up his hand imperiously, bringing to a halt a light truck.

The driver glanced curiously at him, but he already knew about this strange dev officer; it didn’t seem odd to him that he should be hitching a ride, while Sobrie’s presence went unremarked. Su-Mueng urged his companion into the covered rear, joined him, and banged on the driving cab for the Titan to continue.

The truck was half-filled with crated ammunition. They settled down tensely as the vehicle jolted forward. “When we’re out of the area we’ll slip out and make our own way,” Su-Mueng said, speaking low.

Sobrie nodded. They rode for some minutes with no apparent sign of danger, and now that he had time free from action Su-Mueng let his dismay and resentment flood like a tide of sickness through his bloodstream.

“Anyone could have told you,” Sobrie admonished, noticing his distress. “It was a pretty silly thing to do, tying yourself in with the Titans.”

“I thought I would give my father’s death some meaning,” Su-Mueng answered. “Never again would a man die for loving his son.…”

He trailed off, realising that Sobrie didn’t know what he was talking about. His face creased in a pondering frown. “Perhaps the Titans will go away again when they have what they want.”

“Not likely. They’ll probably try to fly this city to the solar system and orbit it somewhere. It gives them a ready-made industrial system, complete with millions of trained slaves, and they’ll make all the use they can of it, for a long time to come. Even if they decide to abandon it, they wouldn’t leave anybody alive,” he ended. “To their way of thinking you people are a blot on nature. I’m amazed you couldn’t see it.”

“I knew they hold to some sort of biological creed, of course,” Su-Mueng admitted grudgingly, “but I hadn’t supposed it would make any difference. Ours was a practical arrangement purely, to our mutual advantage – as I thought. There was no conflict of interests.”

“Ah well, I suppose it would have gone the same way whatever race you belonged to,” Sobrie sighed. “The Titans always seek only their own advantage – never anyone else’s.”

Su-Mueng was silent for a while. “It’s all yet another indictment of Retort City’s social methods,” he said then, grinding the words out. “I was brought up in a closed system, unable to adapt myself to the mores of another world.”

“Your remarks, nevertheless, are acute,” said Sobrie with a wry smile. “All you need is a chance. But where exactly are we supposed to be going?”

“Having brought disaster to my city, the least I can do is to try to rectify the situation. Perhaps something can be salvaged from all this yet.”

“I’d like to know how you’re going to do that, young man.”

Su-Mueng brooded, and after a while peered out of the back of the truck.

“Here,” he commanded.

They dropped lightly from the truck, stumbled, and ran for the shelter of a grove of willow trees. The convoy passed by without pause.

Behind the grove was a colonnade flanked by walls slatted and louvered in rosewood. They set off down this and then Su-Mueng, hesitating frequently, led Sobrie on a long, circuitous tour of the Leisure Retort.

Sobrie, who wasn’t yet very familiar with the retort, saw much that was new to him. The beauty of the place was offset, to some extent, by the ubiquitous black-and-gold Titan uniforms. Amazingly, no general order for their arrest seemed to have gone out and Su-Mueng was several times saluted smartly by patrolling troops.

An unreal air pervaded the city. The inhabitants, contrasting sharply in appearance with their newly arrived conquerors, displayed no apparent alarm. There was much laughing and joking as the sweating Titans set up their emplacements. If Sobrie hadn’t already sampled the mental sophistication of these people, he would have thought them to be simple children who didn’t know what was happening.

At last they entered what Sobrie took to be a nursery. Cribs lined the walls of a sunny room, nearly every crib bearing a baby. All, Sobrie guessed, were newborn.

He couldn’t imagine why Su-Mueng should have brought him to a maternity ward. A young woman came forward, inclining her head while Su-Mueng spoke to her rapidly in a low voice. She frowned, looked doubtful and incredulous by turns, and then the two of them went off somewhere together.

Sobrie was beginning to feel uneasy by the time Su-Mueng returned. “They’ve agreed to it,” the young man said. “It’s kind of hard to get these people to admit there’s an emergency afoot. I thought I was going to have to use force.”

“They’ve agreed to what?” Sobrie asked, following the other. They passed along a corridor, smelling pleasantly of perfumes, and came to a chamber that evidently served some function not clear to Sobrie. There were cradles, set on rails that vanished into the wall. A barely perceptible hum filled the air.

“We’re going down into the Production Retort,” Su-Mueng informed him. Men entered the chamber, removed the cradles and replaced them with a platform on which were mounted a number of padded chairs.

One of them grinned cheerfully at Su-Mueng. “A long time since this was last used,” he said.

At his direction Sobrie seated himself in one of the chairs beside Su-Mueng. The wall facing them rolled away, revealing a tunnel that dwindled into the distance.

Su-Mueng’s expression was matter-of-fact. The platform moved into the tunnel, which was unlit and soon pitch-black. They travelled smoothly, without noticeable acceleration – without, indeed, any noticeable breeze – but Sobrie became aware of an unusual feeling, as if he were being lifted and compressed at the same time, and the faint hum intensified. After perhaps two minutes a light showed ahead, brightening until they emerged into a chamber much like the one they’d left.

Su-Mueng leaped up from his chair, shouting excitedly at the receptionists, young women who seemed astonished at their arrival. Sobrie followed him as he dashed into an adjoining chamber. From nearby he heard the crying of very young babies.

There were no babies, however, in the room in which Sobrie found himself. There was a bank of instruments and controls arranged in a workmanlike way around a bucket seat and desk. In that seat was a controller – but dressed in a simple blue garb rather than the sumptuous finery Sobrie had come to expect in the Leisure Retort.

Energetically Su-Mueng pushed the controller aside and applied himself with great concentration to the controls. The displaced controller gawped from the floor, too staggered to rise.

The ever-present hum that lay just within the bounds of audibility died into silence. With satisfaction Su-Mueng drew his automatic and fired several times into the main switch, sealing the settings temporarily at least.

The two retorts were now totally separated in time: no time-gradient connected them. If the Titans were to come along the tunnel Sobrie and Su-Mueng had just travelled, or to enter by any other route, they would only arrive into its unpeopled future.

Su-Mueng turned to the controller he’d just treated so barbarically. “Come with me,” he said. “It’s imperative that I speak with the retort managers!”

“We’ve captured the ruling clique, sir.”

“All right, let me see them.”

Brourne stared at the impassive, droopy-moustached, silky-bearded, satined and silked old men who came up on the screen. “How do you know this is the ruling clique?” he demanded.

The youthful, enthusiastic Captain came back into view. “They admit it, sir. We’ve found a kind of computer that knows a few Earth phrases.”

“Oh? How many?”

“Not enough for a useful interrogation, I’m afraid.”

“I see. Well, lock them up until later.”

“Yes, sir.” The Captain snapped off a salute and went off the line.

Brourne turned away, gingerly massaging his injured arm, which lay in a sling. What was the point of capturing anybody when he couldn’t talk to them? He cursed again for having let Hueh Su-Mueng get away. At the time he’d thought nothing of it, hadn’t even ordered any pursuit or search. Why bother? The Chink’s first move had doubtless been to divest himself of his uniform, whereupon he might as well have been invisible. It was practically impossible to tell these Chinks apart.

There was another possibility, Brourne reminded himself. Leard Ascar was still in the city somewhere and sooner or later his men would find him. By all accounts Ascar was an intractable, unbalanced personality – in his preflight briefing Brourne had been advised that he was “unreliable” – but presumably he knew the language, as Heshke had. He would have to do.

The vidcom burred again. Brourne returned to it.

“HQ. Major Brourne.”

A serious-faced tech officer gazed out at him. “The sortie to the lower retort has sent back a report, sir.”

“Yes?”

“They say it’s deserted. Crammed full of factories and workshops – but there’s not a single human being there.”

“Deserted? You’re sure they’re not hiding out somewhere?”

“That’s not how things look, and no one’s been found yet.”

“So maybe that cur of a Chink was lying,” Brourne responded. “The whole place could be automated – no workers at all.”

“Perhaps – but again, that’s not how it looks. Right now there’s not a wheel turning. And there are signs of decay, as though the whole complex had been abandoned about fifty years ago.”

Brourne became thoughtful. “That doesn’t figure,” he rumbled. “It doesn’t figure at all. Wasn’t there supposed to be something about the two halves of the city not matching in time?”

“Our men simply went through a tunnel about a third of a mile long,” the tech said. “But there are other ways in. There’s a marshalling yard where the produce of the factories comes through. I’ll investigate further.”

“Do that. And keep me informed.”

Right now, he thought, is where Leard Ascar would really come in handy.

Ascar was trembling with excitement.

During the past few weeks Shiu Kung-Chien had told him a great deal about the Oblique Entity that had once nearly annihilated Retort City – as much, indeed, as the elder scientist himself knew. Ascar had begged that he, too, be allowed to visit this strange intelligence via the all-sense sender, but Shiu had prevailed upon him to delay the experience. The all-sense transmissions, crude at the moment, needed refining.

And so Ascar had worked patiently under the old man’s direction, studying and thinking deeply. The Oblique Entity, Shiu had intimated, had powers beyond the merely human. It wasn’t a biological intelligence; it wasn’t associated with any planet or celestial body; its nature, though it had a material structure, wasn’t readily intelligible to human beings.

During the last phase of their work to improve the transceiver the Titans had arrived and invaded the ISS. Shiu, imperturbable as ever (Ascar was impressed by the way any event, no matter how grave, failed to shake the placidity of the people here; they were, Shiu had told him once, dilettantes at everything, even living), had left Ascar to carry on, which he did while the noises of destruction as the Titans pulled down sections of the city to facilitate their easy movement grew nearer and nearer.

For the past half hour the sounds of conquest had died down. Presumably the Leisure Retort was now in the Titans’ grip, which meant that they’d soon be battering down his door. He was anxious to have made his trip before they did that, because they would very likely deprive him of any further opportunity and he was impelled by more than mere intellectual curiosity. Some time ago he’d asked Shiu Kung-Chien how the Oblique Entity’s own knowledge of the physical universe compared with their own.

Shiu Kung-Chien had hesitated. Compared with men, he’d said, the Oblique Entity had knowledge that was like that “of one of your ancient gods”.

Ascar had some very definite questions to put to this entity.

And so Ascar completed the countdown. Shiu had already completed a trial run with the new equipment; all Ascar had to do now was to make the final checks.

The flickering ideograms froze at last; the apparatus was poised in readiness. He rubbed his eyes. Although he’d been trained in a matter of minutes to read the specialised calligraphy Shiu used, he still found the ideograms hard to focus on at speed.

He glanced over the big, gleaming, block-like transformers of time energy that were dumped unceremoniously in the middle of the observatory, humming fuzzily. They had, he supposed, taken a couple of years to manufacture, yet they’d been delivered to Shiu within an hour of his submitting the designs. Such was the nature of the resources he could draw on: resources he used so carelessly, and in so cavalier a fashion, that Ascar was constantly amazed. He’d order new equipment with absolutely no thought for the labour time involved, drawing up version after version of some difficult design and demanding an operating model of each so as to try out his various (and sometimes offhand) ideas. His storeroom was jammed with machinery, much of it never used, and many items that arrived were sent back to be scrapped after a few desultory experiments.

The Oblique Entity was already reciprocating on their contact stream, expressing its willingness for the exchange. The cybernetic servitor moved into position to operate the equipment. His heart thumping, Ascar stepped into the transparent sphere. The hatch closed behind him as he sat down in the central chair, and then he was in darkness.

The transceiver seized his senses and snatched them out of intelligible time, hurling them in a direction no compass could ever find.

At first there was only silence, and continued darkness. Then out of that darkness a voice said suddenly: “I am here. You have arrived. What do you want?”

The voice, though loud, was smooth and confidential. It seemed to be spoken close to his ear – or rather, to both his ears. Behind the voice was a silence, but behind that silence Ascar fancied he could hear a whispering whistle, like the susurration that sometimes accompanied radio transmissions.

“I want to see you,” Ascar said into the darkness.

“How do you wish to see me?”

Ascar didn’t understand the question for a moment; then he answered: “I want to see you as you are.”

“Very well. Here is our physical reality.”

The change was brutally abrupt. Ascar suddenly found himself amid an uproar in a long gallery. He was kneeling, for the height of the gallery was only about four feet and gave approximately the same room on either side, though it stretched away ahead of him seemingly into infinity. Furthermore it was only one of a multitude of such structures arranged around him, and which he glimpsed through the iron frameworks separating them. And those frameworks contained —

He inspected the complex closely. As near as he could judge, the objects would best be described as machines. The galleries were, in fact, avenues for the siting of a continuous machine process which clattered, rotated and shuffled through indefinably intricate operations. Ascar was in the midst of a roaring, close-packed factory of vast extent, like some industrialised hell.

“Did you construct this?” he asked into thin air.

“No,” came the immediate answer, easily audible despite the deafening racket. “This is us – a small part of me. All this came into existence spontaneously, as a result of the process of time. I/We is not biological.”

Ascar felt himself moving forward. The floor offered no perceptible resistance to his knees, but a hot wind played against his face. The endless galleries swept past blurrily as he gathered speed and went darting into a claustrophobic infinity.

Then, without warning, he came to a stop. The machine complex was behind him in the form of a towering serried wall; its array, he recognised, was reminiscent of the array of atoms in a metal.

He faced now a huge gulf from whose depths came tumultuous boiling, a giving forth of steam clouds and acid vapours which seared his skin. Its size was impossible to judge. Ascar moved along the edge of this infernal pit until he came to another of its boundaries: a second wall of solid-packed quasi-machinery. But this time there were no narrow galleries through the honeycomb; the whole mass was impenetrable, none of its interstices being large enough to admit his body.

He glanced overhead, attracted by a regular, gigantic noise. Slanting obliquely over the space above him was something like a moving belt, or a high-speed printing press. It roared on its way at a colossal speed, for all that it must have been a hundred miles long.

“Perhaps you would prefer to meet me in different surroundings,” the Oblique Entity said. Everything vanished, and was replaced.

Ascar was sitting in a moderately sized room. The walls were of pale blue decorated with a white cornice. The light, coming from an unseen source, was very radiant, reminding him of sunlight. Before Ascar stood a table of polished walnut.

A door opened. In walked a young woman who sat down opposite him. Her skin was silver-blue. A slight smile was on her lips. Her eyes were bright blue, also, but they looked beyond, Ascar, as if they weren’t functional.

“Good day,” she said in a pleasant, full voice. “Is this more agreeable?”

Ascar took a moment to recover himself. “But this isn’t you as you really are, is it?” he said then.

“No, that is true.”

Ascar was vaguely disappointed. “Then it’s just an illusion you’re putting through the all-sense receiver. I didn’t come all this way looking for illusions.”

“Incorrect: it is no illusion. I have constructed the environment as a physical reality, into which I then projected your senses. Even the woman is a real living woman.”

Now Ascar was startled. “You can do that – in a moment?”

A pause. “Not in a moment, exactly. To produce the woman took a hundred years. Duration is of no consequence when time can be turned in a circle.”

So that was it, Ascar thought. It was the Production Retort all over again, but on an even larger scale. Here, the beginning and the end of a lengthy process could be bent around to occupy successive moments. He mulled over another point.

“Sometimes you call yourself I, and sometimes we,” he observed. “What are you, a single intelligence or a community?”

“I am neither individual nor plural,” the Oblique Entity replied. “Neither I nor we is adequate to describe my nature.”

“Then just what are you?”

The girl inclined her head, her eyes seeking a point beyond the wall, and a slight, quizzical frown crossed her features.

“Perhaps these surroundings, even, are disconcerting?” she suggested. “Let us try again.”

She rose, and pointed to a second door that opened itself behind Ascar. “Please continue on down the corridor,” she invited. “Another room has been prepared.”

After a last doubtful glance at the girl Ascar obeyed. At first the corridor was featureless, grey and doorless, stretching away to a bend, or dead-end, about two hundred yards ahead. But as he proceeded a peculiar illusion began to occur. Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed arcaded openings beyond which fish-like shapes flitted among green stalks and through wavering groves. Yet when he turned his head to look directly at this phenomenon his eye met only a blank wall.

He began to get the odd feeling that the elusive fish-shapes flitted, not externally, but through the recesses of his own mind. After a few tens of yards, however, the illusion ceased. But at the same time the character of the corridor began to change subtly, to become less featureless and more familiar. Suddenly Ascar stopped. He had come to a door: a door with the number 22 stencilled on it.

He looked around him. Just ahead was a T-junction, where arrowed notices pointed out departments in either direction. He looked again at the door with the number 22, recognising scratch marks and pimples in the paint.

This place was a corridor in the Sarn Establishment! Or a perfect replica thereof.

With thumping heart he opened the door. Within was a cosy, cabin-like room with a bunk, chairs, and a table strewn with abstracts and reports together with a large scratch-pad. The wall to his left was a bookcase holding a small library of specialised volumes.

It was his own room and refuge that he’d inhabited for five years.

Slowly he closed the door and sat down in his favourite chair, realising as he did so that the Oblique Entity must have extracted all these details from his own memory.

Above the door was a small speaker that had been used in the Sarn Establishment for paging. The Oblique Entity spoke now through this grill.

“To answer your question,” it said in its former male voice, “the type of consciousness I possess is neither an individual consciousness, nor is it a group consciousness or a community of individuals. In your language I could come closer to the facts simply by referring to ourselves as here, rather than to I or we. Henceforth, then I will give ourselves the personal pronoun here.”

Ascar pondered that, nodding. The Entity’s ploy, he decided, was working. He did feel more relaxed to be sitting here in his own room. It would have been easy to forget altogether that this was not, in fact, the Sarn Establishment.

“Since you can evidently read my mind, you already know what I mean to ask you,” he said. “Tell me, how much do you know of Earth?”

“Here know all about Earth,” the Oblique Entity replied.

“You mean you’ve read all about it in my mind?”

“No. Here knew about Earth already. By direct observation.”

“Then you know what’s about to happen there?”

“Yes.”

“Then,” said Ascar, giving his words emphasis and deliberation, “is there any way – any way at all – that the stream of time can be turned aside or stopped? Any way that collision can be avoided?”

The Oblique Entity didn’t answer immediately. Instead, a rich humming note issued from the speaker. All at once everything exploded around Ascar. He was floating in an inchoate void. Around him swam coloured shapes of every description, drifting in and out of his vision like sparks.

His body seemed to become elongated, like a streamer of smoke in a breeze; he was being stretched out to infinity. This process seemed to go on for a long, long time; and then, just as suddenly, he was back in his favourite chair in his comfortable room.

“There is nothing you can do,” the Oblique Entity said.

When Brourne’s troops finally broke into the space-time observatory they found Leard Ascar still sitting in the transparent sphere of the all-sense transceiver.

After a matter of minutes they contrived to open the hatch. Ascar appeared not to see them. He sat muttering unintelligibly to himself, offering no resistance when they grabbed him by the arms and hauled him out.

“This must be Ascar,” the sergeant said. “If you ask me these Chink gadgets have driven him out of his mind!”

“Maybe he’s fallen foul of a Chink puzzle,” a trooper offered helpfully.

“Eh? What?” Ascar began to come round, peering at the trooper with narrowed eyes.

“Let’s get him away from here,” the sergeant ordered. “Major Brourne wants to see him right away.”

They steered Ascar out of the observatory. And then an unexpected sound caused them all at once to come to a stop and gaze at one another wonderingly. For some hours the city had been quiet, but now, from the distance, came, the sudden, continuous eruption of heavy gunfire.

Heshke accepted a tobacco roll, inhaling the fragrant smoke with a sense of special pleasure.

It was, in the fullest sense, a farewell party. They all knew that the Titans would come rolling into the reservation tomorrow, or at the latest the day after. Herrick had called together a few of his friends, as he put it, to “celebrate the end of the species”.

The atmosphere was relaxed and convivial. Heshke couldn’t help but admire the calm way the Amhraks were accepting the inevitable. Perhaps, he thought, it was the inevitability that lent such dignity. If there had been any hope at all, that might have led to panic.

Much of the conversation was in Amhrak, at which Heshke was not as yet very skilled. However, out of politeness, enough Verolian – the main language of white men that was used all over the Earth now – was spoken so that he felt by no means left out.

A lanky Amhrak girl chatted to him, sipping a glass of wine synthesised by a newly perfected process. “You must find our village rather dull after Pradna,” she said, smiling.

“I wasn’t actually in Pradna,” he told her. “I spent most of my time in the field, working on alien ruins. Pradna is a pretty ghastly place anyway, to tell you the truth. I like it much better here… in spite of what’s happening.”

As he spoke the last words he had the sinking feeling of having committed a faux pas. These people could have a taboo about speaking of… that, he thought timidly. But the girl merely laughed, quite without strain.

“It must be really awful in Pradna,” she joked, “to prefer that.”

Herrick had opened the double doors of his workshop and was fiddling with his transmitterless television receiver. To hide his embarrassment Heshke joined him, and for some minutes Herrick phased through the magnetowaves, seeking coherent visuals and gaining more than the usual number.

“Conditions are remarkably conducive tonight,” Herrick commented with some surprise. “The nodes are particularly strong. Here comes a good one.”

The view, as most of them were, was from the air. It showed the outskirts of a town of moderate size, judging by the layout of the buildings. The angle of the sun revealed the time to be midafternoon.

“Do you recognise it?” Herrick asked him.

Heshke shook his head. It could have been any of a thousand such towns.

Instead of dissipating after a few seconds, which was what normally happened, the picture lingered. Herrick managed to steady it further, until the quality was almost of commercial standard.

“At last I’m getting somewhere,” Herrick said sadly. “It seems a pity to – what’s that?”

The frame of the picture itself remained steady and bright; but certain elements in it were fading. While the two men watched (Heshke was vaguely aware of other eyes peering over his shoulder through the double doors) all the buildings in the picture seemed to melt away, leaving a bare background. Not only that, but a grove of trees also vanished, together with a stretch of grass.

What remained was bare, arid soil.

“Some effect of the system?” Heshke suggested mildly.

“I don’t see how,” Herrick muttered. “There are television systems that could produce this effect – systems employing a memory bank to hold persistent elements in the picture, so that it’s built up piece by piece – but I rely on a simple scanning procedure. Look, you can see the places where those buildings had stood. It’s just as if the whole town had disappeared into thin air.”

“Then you must have been picking up two different images superimposed,” Heshke said. “One faded out and you’re left with the other.”

“Yes, that might explain it.” Herrick nodded reluctantly. “That must be it. But as to how they came to blend so perfectly – and I thought I’d licked the tuning problem, too.”

Heshke wandered out of the room, leaving Herrick still absorbed in his apparatus.

He went onto the verandah and looked out over the desert. The night sky seemed to hold a strange, flickering light, as if lightning was playing somewhere beyond the horizon.

The attempted return to Brourne’s HQ was hectic.

They’d gone about half a mile in the squad’s armoured runabout – the Titans scorned to use Retort City’s own public transport system – when they came upon one of the main arteries that had been cleared to give the city’s new masters easy access. The highway was thundering with traffic, all of it heading toward the sound of bombs and gunfire that came from the city’s bottleneck end.

“Toward the front,” muttered the sergeant.

The wild looks on the faces of the Titans who clung to the swaying gun carriages told them that the situation had more than a measure of desperation. No natives were in sight: presumably they were all huddling somewhere, terrified of Titan savagery when the going got tough. A Titan soldier, for example, would shoot anyone who happened to be standing in his way when a sense of urgency overtook him.

“What in the Mother’s name is going on, sarge?” one of the troopers asked.

“Must be something big.” He ruminated. “Maybe the Chinks were holding onto their defences.” He nudged the driver. “Our job is to get this man to HQ. Get across the highway when there’s a gap and go by way of the secondary route.”

The highway came in from the main supply dump, close to the dock. HQ was in a central part of the city. Eventually they crossed the busy viaduct and continued, past empty tiers, galleries and plazas.

“This place gives me the creeps,” someone grumbled. “I’ll be glad to get back to Pradna.”

Ahead of them was a machine gun post. Troopers yelled at them, brought them to a halt.

“You can’t go up there,” a corporal told them, “it’s cut off.”

“Cut off by who?”

“The Chinks have an army,” the corporal said stolidly. “Everything’s in chaos.”

Suddenly the machine gun gave out a short stuttering burst. “Here they come!” yelled the man firing it.

The sergeant reached into the runabout and brought out his burp gun. He could see them, too, now, emerging from the end of a tree-lined avenue. They wore rough, blue uniforms and wide-brimmed dome helmets.

He rapped out orders. The armoured runabout proceeded slowly up the avenue, its occupants firing from its slits. He stayed with the machine gun crew, down on one knee, peering over the barricade and fingering his burp gun.

And then, without any warning, the Chinks were upon them: all around them, as if they’d dropped from the nonexistent sky.

Titan-Major Brourne knew already that he’d committed a tactical error when he moved his HQ from the cramped accommodation at the dockside to his present palatial quarters near the centre of the city.

At the time it had seemed reasonable. The city had been taken. He needed an administrative centre, and the dock just wouldn’t do.

But now, up through the bottleneck from the Production Retort which all his scouts had assured him was empty, had come a huge army, well-prepared and well-disciplined. Brourne still only had an inkling of where this army had really come from, but in any case explanations, at this stage, were very low down on his list of priorities.

When it first became clear that the threat was serious he’d given thought to the route back to the dock, to a withdrawal to the ships floating outside the city if necessary. With deep chagrin he learned that the dock was one of the first points to be seized by the enemy. His forces were still trying to retake it.

Elsewhere the story was one of repeated disaster. The invasion force was overwhelming, and none of the measures he’d taken to retain military control seemed effective. The Chinks were able to flit in and out of existence like shadows, by means of some device they possessed, apparently, and so were able to infiltrate all his fixed defences. They carried only light arms and knives, but more often than not fought using an unarmed combat technique that was as deadly as anything he’d come across.

His ire rising, Brourne listened to the distressing tale of section after section of the city falling, of the enemy appearing simultaneously everywhere, that the battle reports told. He slammed down the key that opened the line to all district commanders. For some minutes now they’d been requesting instructions.

“Kill everything that moves!” he roared. “Have you got that? Everything that moves!”

“Haven’t I met you somewhere?” Leard Ascar asked, squinting quizzically at the white man wearing the uniform of the Lower Retort invaders.

“Sobrie Oblomot.” The other smiled. “We met twice, a few days ago. For you it was a few days ago, that is; for me it was more than a year.”

“Oh yes, that’s right,” Ascar muttered. “You came in on the ship from Earth, in Rond Heshke’s place. Forgive me, I’ve a poor memory for faces.” He waved a hand negligently. “So the Titans haven’t had it all their own way?”

Sobrie allowed himself a look of quiet triumph. “They don’t know what’s hit them. You know the secret of the Lower Retort’s success, of course – that it can always take as much time as it needs to work on something, even when results are required in minutes. We only spent a year in organising our onslaught, but we could have taken twenty-five years if need be.”

“Yes, I thought there would be something like that,” Ascar said. “I’m surprised the Titans let you pull off such a stunt.”

“They had no opportunity to stop us. Do you remember a young man by the name of Hueh Su-Mueng? The Titans brought him with them, back from Earth. They’d have done better to leave him behind: he switched off the time tunnel between the two retorts, denying the Titans access to it, in its normative time, at least. I expect they could have found their way into it with the new ships they have, but we were upon them before they fully realised what was going on. In Leisure Retort time, Su-Mueng and myself were back within an hour of leaving – with a fully-equipped and trained army!”

Ascar grunted. “Somebody on Limnich’s staff goofed. Not that it matters.” He stretched. He’d been separated from the Titan prisoners and put in more luxurious surroundings reserved, he guessed, for detainees of more exalted rank. Oblomot’s visit, however, had been a surprise.

“I remember you now,” he said. “You’re some kind of revolutionary nut, aren’t you? A dev-lover. Yes, that’s right.”

“Say what you like. I’m not alone: Su-Mueng is a revolutionary too. Things are going to change around here.”

“If you’re expecting the Production Retort workers to toe some kind of rebellion line, forget it,” Ascar told him. “People know how to arrange society in this ISS. It’s orderly.”

“Well, we’ll see. Su-Mueng is an extraordinary person in some ways. It’s really impressive the way he was able to get things organised in the Lower Retort. And we’ve saved Retort City!” Boastfulness crept into Sobrie’s voice.

“They respond naturally to being organised down there,” Ascar retorted. “It doesn’t mean a damn thing.” He yawned. He felt tired. “So you’ve saved Retort City, have you? Well, bend a knee to me, friend. You’re looking at the man who’s saved the planet Earth!”

“You…?” began Sobrie wonderingly, but he was interrupted by a call from outside the apartment.

Hueh Su-Mueng entered. He glanced disdainfully at Ascar, then turned to Sobrie.

“All goes well. The retort is ours, apart from a few pockets of resistance. Also, we’ve found out where the Earthmen were holding the Leisure Retort cabinet. They should be arriving here soon!”

“Good!” said Ascar vigorously. “Since this little fiasco is finished, I take it my master Shiu Kung-Chien can now return to his observatory and attend matters of greater import. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to join him.”

“Oh yes, I recognise you,” Su-Mueng said. “You’re the man who preferred to devote himself to abstract things, rather than try to help his own people. Go on your way, by all means. We have no use for you here.” There was a new hardness in the young man, Ascar noted. The past year had changed him.

“Wait!” Sobrie interjected. “What was that you were saying just now – about Earth?”

Ascar put on a stubborn face and folded his arms. “I want to see Shiu Kung-Chien.”

“I see what’s in your mind,” Su-Mueng said after a moment. “You’re afraid that I’ll execute all the cabinet ministers, including your beloved master. Don’t worry, that’s for the people to decide, not me. Perhaps he’ll be put to work in a factory, to discover what it’s like.”

He gave the word to Sobrie, who went out and returned a few minutes later with Shiu. The aged scientist murmured a perfunctory greeting as he entered the room, then spoke to Ascar.

“Was there time to complete the operation?” he asked.

“Just about,” said Ascar. “I visited the Oblique Entity, anyway.”

“And did you learn anything encouraging?”

“It depends which way you look at it – but yes, you could say I did.”

He turned to Sobrie. “You’re an Earthman, I suppose, so I’ll try to explain. You see, my efforts haven’t been quite as devoid of practical motive as might be imagined. Several light-years from here there exists an… intelligence, an entity that has been known to Retort City for some time. It’s called the Oblique Entity, because it exists obliquely in time. Our object – mine and Shiu’s – has been to establish a good enough communication with this entity for an exchange of practical knowledge. Its understanding of the time process is much more profound than ours; consequently I was anxious to find out if it could help us, if there was any way available to science of controlling the onrush of time-systems so as to avert the impending collision on Earth.”

“I… think I see,” Sobrie said in a subdued tone. He felt slightly ashamed of having misjudged Ascar, whom hitherto he’d taken to be little more than a dropout.

Ascar looked at Shiu before continuing. “To my surprise, sir, the Entity already knew about Earth. It makes a hobby, apparently, of watching planets where life exists. I was even more staggered to hear it admit that it has the power, if it chooses, to prevent the cataclysm there. It’s able to exert an influence over the direction of time, even upon so massive a system as Earth’s and even at so great a distance. Don’t ask me how. But it did make it quite clear to me that this power is something human beings will never learn to control.”

“But that makes it like a god!” Sobrie exclaimed disbelievingly.

“Yes, like a god,” Ascar repeated, his lips curling slightly. That was exactly what he’d said at the time, and the Entity’s reply still sounded in his ears: I am as insignificant as you. The Supreme does not notice me, just as it does not notice you.

“Is he speaking the truth?” Sobrie asked Shiu anxiously. “Is that really what you’ve been doing in your observatory?”

Shiu’s tone was cold and superior. “That was indeed our project. I’d suspected long ago that the Oblique Entity has powers unknown to us.”

“Deus ex machina,” Sobrie muttered.

“Yes,” said Ascar tonelessly, “a real deus ex machina. However, the Oblique Entity insists it’s basically a spectator, a noninterventionist. When I asked it to use its powers on our behalf, it refused.”

A heavy silence fell on the room, and Su-Mueng stirred.

“My regrets for your planet,” he said stiffly. “However, if you’ll excuse me, Retort City will continue to exist and I have business to deal with.”

“That wasn’t the end of the matter, sir,” Ascar said quickly to Shiu when the younger man had left the room, “I argued with it further.”

His mind fled back to his recent experience, still fresh in his memory. At first his world-weary cynicism had come to the fore. He’d shrugged his shoulders and mentally written Earth off.

But then he’d found that he was unable to give up so easily. Something in him had pushed him on, made him press his case to this being beside which he felt like an ant. He didn’t plead, exactly – no, plead wouldn’t be the right word – but he’d come close to it.

The Oblique Entity had answered in a throbbing voice. “There is considerable drama in this situation on Earth,” it had said. “I am reluctant to interfere with that drama.”

For periods during their discourse the room in which Ascar sat had wavered and vanished, and he’d found himself drifting like a dust-mote through vast ratcheting machine-spaces, or through dark emptinesses in which swam flimmering, half-seen shapes. This was not, he decided eventually, an attempt to frighten him or a show of anger on the Entity’s part. It was simply that its thought processes occasionally distracted its attention from the job of transmitting sensory data to the receiver in Retort City, and Ascar was left picking up random images. Each time the Entity spoke, however, he was promptly deposited back in his simulated room.

Then, finally, the voice had changed. Ascar had heard the girl’s voice again, coming through the speaker with a tinkly laugh.

“Enterprise such as yours deserves a reward,” she’d said. “This is what I will do.”

And the Entity had shown him, not in words, but in a graphic, simple demonstration that had jolted right into his consciousness. It showed him time being split up into rivulets and streaming in all directions to bring deserts to life. And it showed him the main torrent from which those rivulets were taken, rushing headlong to where it would meet with an equal power and be convulsed into a horrendous vortex that would destroy it.

When Ascar explained this to Shiu the old man nodded, reflecting at length.

“Ingenious,” he said. “And logical. The Oblique Entity clearly has a sense of justice.”

“I don’t understand,” Sobrie Oblomot complained. “I don’t understand any of it.”

Shiu glanced at him and then wrapped his arms in his sleeves. “It would be difficult for a layman,” he admitted in his slow, musing voice. “Attend to the following description. Time moves forward, always in one direction. But there is more than just one direction in the real universe. Six dimensions can be defined, not just the three that the Absolute Present produces. So outside the stream of time that travels from the past into the future, there is yet more non-time, like a landscape through which the river of time flows. What this means in practical terms is that there are alternate Earths existing in the fifth dimension, side by side with the Earth you know. These Earths are uninhabited: they have no life, and no time. The river of time could be turned aside so as to flow into one of these alternate Earths, instead of directly onward. There would be no collision; an ideal solution to your problem.”

“And that, I take it, is not to be?” Sobrie asked, wrestling with these abstract ideas.

“Regretfully, no. The Entity is leaving the main stream of Earth’s time untouched. It agrees only to split off rivulets from the main flow, sending each into a different Earth – there are a vast number to choose from, all more or less the same. The people involved in these rivulets will find themselves constituting a small island of life in an otherwise desert planet. But eventually that life will spread to cover the whole globe. In each case a new world will be born.” He nodded to himself, an unselfconscious picture of sagacity. “It is, perhaps, a wiser solution than we would have chosen.”

“Each surviving dev reservation will be given a world of its own,” Ascar explained to Sobrie. “The Oblique Entity is giving every human subspecies its own future, free of interference from any other. A contingent of Titan civilisation, even, is being given its own Earth to rule – an Earth where there will be no alien interventionists, no future-Earth aliens to destroy Titan ambitions. And the same holds for the future-Earth race: they also have various factions and nations, some of which will be saved.”

“And for the rest – annihilation?”

“Yes – almost.” A gleam, as of a vision, came into Ascar’s eyes. “The Armageddon, the great war through time, must take place, as must the collision in time. But even there, there will be survivors. Even now the Titans are drawing up blueprints for protective bunkers, buffered with intense artificial time fields to try to ward off the force of the collision. Some of these bunkers – a few – will probably survive, provided their equipment is rugged enough. So there will be a handful of Titans left alive after it’s all over, to try to rebuild something on an Earth that will be unimaginably devastated.”

“This splitting up of time – when is it going to happen?”

“It already has happened,” Ascar said. “It had happened before the Titans found me in Shiu’s observatory.”

Sobrie wondered if his friends in the Amhrak reservation had noticed their changed circumstances yet. It was good, he thought to himself, to know that Amhrak civilisation would continue.

Titan-Major Brourne flung the array of vidcoms off the table with one sweep of his arm. Nobody was reporting in now.

Brourne was alone in his office; he’d already sent his adjutant outside to help man the barricade. The time had come, he saw, for the last stand.

He strode from the office. As far as he knew his HQ was the only post not yet overrun, and an attack was expected any second.

A long gallery-like concourse stretched ahead of the building he’d chosen for his headquarters. It gave an excellent defensive position: a long avenue, bare of cover, up which an enemy must pass. But that would avail little, he knew, against the tricks of these Chinks.

He’d barely reached the steel barricade set up across this avenue, and was giving a few words of encouragement to his men, when the attack started.

The Chinks were everywhere simultaneously. Several appeared on his side of the barricade and some of his men set to fighting them furiously at close quarters, while others were firing stolidly down the avenue. Once again Brourne observed the dreadful effects of Hoka, but fortunately the Chinks here were outnumbered. Then he directed his eyes down the avenue. There they were: blue-uniformed, broad-helmeted, flitting in and out of existence and advancing down the concourse like shadowy ghosts. He was facing an enemy one could only see half the time.

Suddenly Major Brourne gave a violent, almost joyous roar. He leaped forward to a gun emplacement, pushed the gunner aside, and lifted the heavy machine gun off its tripod. Normally two men were needed to carry it, but Brourne clambered over the barricade, the cartridge belt trailing behind him, and fired a long burst from the hip.

“No use squatting here, men!” he bellowed. “Come on out and get ’em!”

He went lumbering down the concourse, firing intermittently from the big, clumsy weapon, into the crowd of flitting Chinks. This was the way to go, he told himself. To die like a man, fighting to the last breath against a subhuman horde.

He was still firing when a hand touched the back of his neck and he died.

The blue-garbed soldiers thronged the plaza before the balcony where Su-Mueng, Sobrie and Prime Minister Hwen Wu, with members of his cabinet, stood. Su-Mueng licked his lips nervously.

It had been his own idea: he would parade the cabinet of the Leisure Retort before his victorious soldiers. The venerable officials would lose face, would seem human and vulnerable. The workers would see for themselves the men who’d denied them their rights.

Hwen Wu, however, had been unexpectedly in favour of the confrontation. Indeed, he’d seemed not to understand Su-Mueng’s intent, but had thanked him graciously for organising the proceeding. He should have been more forthright with Hwen Wu, Su-Mueng thought.

Because, in rolling, sonorous tones, the Prime Minister was praising the workers of the Production Retort for their timely intervention.

“Your sense of civil duty is gladdening to the heart,” he said after a lengthy address, his aristocratic face impressively unreadable. “And now that the foreign barbarian has been driven out, we can all return to our allotted places and restore the perfect harmony of an ordered society.”

He stepped back, folded his hands, smiled benignly upon Su-Mueng and upon the Production Retort managers who stood to one side, and retired to the rear of the balcony.

He’s stolen the show, thought Sobrie. Poor Su-Mueng.

The managing director of the Production Retort came forward, inclined his head toward Hwen Wu, and then turned to speak a few polite words to the crowd, expressing his satisfaction at having served the city.

The workers gazed up at him with blank, curious faces. Everything was orderly and peaceful. With a shock Sobrie realised that they were going to return without argument to the Lower Retort, to their factories, their crude amusements.

The manager left the stage. Su-Mueng, Sobrie saw, was floundering. As a revolutionary, he was still a simpleton. He didn’t have a clue as to how to effect social change: he thought it would happen of its own accord.

After hesitating, Su-Mueng took a step forward, but Sobrie overtook him and stepped into the centre of the crowd’s attention.

What could he say that would begin the work of changing these people’s minds? Of setting them on the course that would lead to equality between all men? Sobrie searched his mind, running through endless revolutionary texts, until he came to the most ancient evocation of all: one that was legendary, almost mythical, having been handed down since long before recorded history.

He raised his clenched fist. “Workers of the world, arise!” he began. “You have nothing to lose but your chains.…”