Collision with Chronos

4

The Titan time traveller was considerably larger than its alien prototype. Instead of the latter’s cylindrical form it had a cagelike structure, being square at both ends and ribbed with louvres. One end contained the cabin for the crew and passengers, the other the bulky drive machinery. It did, however, borrow some features from the alien design: the windows were of a thick nearly-opaque material possessing the quality of image-control, capable of being adjusted so as to admit or block light, and the control system copied the alien concept in its entirety.

Initially the machine’s departure from the present was assisted by a second, even larger apparatus from whose maw it currently projected like a tongue, but once dispatched it flew under its own power and had no contact with the home base. This fact was nagging at Heshke’s consciousness as he tried to fight down his fears and allowed himself to be helped into the stiff combat armour the Titans had insisted he wear.

“Are you comfortable?” the young com-tech asked.

He nodded, though he was far from comfortable since the leather-like suit restricted all his movements.

For some minutes the Dispatch Room had been filled with a loud whine as the launcher was warmed up. Ascar was already in his suit, as were the two technical officers who were to pilot the time traveller. Ascar beckoned him forward.

“All set? Your gear all ready?”

“It’s on board.” Not that he anticipated using much; he didn’t really know what he would do when he reached the ruins.

“Then let’s take our places.”

He followed Ascar into the time traveller. The cabin was comparatively large, about nine feet by nine. He sat down beside the physicist, strapping himself in. The tech officers came in, wearing their combat suits with more grace and style, and settled into the pilots’ seats in the front of the cabin. The whine from the Dispatch Room was cut off as the door slid shut: the time traveller was soundproof.

Heshke’s muscles knotted up. The tech officers murmured to one another and through microphones to the team outside. A raw, fuzzy hum arose to their rear.

One of the Titans half turned his head to speak to them. “We’re away.”

Was that all? Heshke’s stomach untensed itself. He felt no sensation of motion; but through the semi-opaque windows he saw a runny blur of motion and colour, phasing wildly to and fro as though the vehicle were pursuing an erratic course.

“Home,” Ascar said to him. “We’re leaving home.”

Heshke looked at him quizzically.

“Well of course it’s home!” the other scowled impatiently. “Don’t you know what I mean? Haven’t you any vision?”

“I guess not.”

“I mean we’re leaving the Absolute Present. That’s home to us. The only place in the universe where conscious life exists. Just think of all of past time, stretching back and back into eternity. The further back you go into it the further away you are from the brief intersection where life exists, until you would be like a ghost, a brief fragment of time in a timeless abyss… and the same if you go into the future. Doesn’t that get through to you?”

Ascar’s eyes were bulging and there were tiny beads of perspiration on his brow. “Is that what going back in time is like for you?” Heshke asked quietly. “Like falling into an abyss?”

“That’s what it’s like – a chasm without a bottom. And we’re descending into it.”

Suddenly Heshke understood Ascar. The man was afraid, for all that he had reassured Heshke. He was afraid that something would go wrong and they would be cut off, unable to get back to the world of life and time.

He had too vivid an imagination; and he was getting a little melodramatic. Heshke wondered if the physicist’s five-year-long obsession had left him mentally unbalanced. After all, it was an awesome subject to have preying on one’s mind.

Heshke himself still found the explanations of time and non-time too abstruse to be grasped properly; his mind spun when he tried to think it through. He found it hard to understand why the travelling wave of ‘now’, that is, of time, should be at one particular place at one particular time.…

No, that wasn’t it, either. Being where it was was what made time.…

They passed the rest of the journey in silence, Ascar slouching in his chair, insofar as the combat suit would let him, and occasionally muttering to himself. Three hours passed; and then the tech officer warned them that they were coming in to land.

A gong sounded. The blurred, racing images that had almost lulled Heshke to sleep ceased, but he couldn’t see anything definite through the thickened windows.

Ascar released his safety strap and invited Heshke to do the same. “Come and have a look out of the window,” he said, “you might like to see this.”

Heshke followed him and peered through one of the frosty windows. Ascar turned a knob and the plate cleared.

Outside was a scene reassuringly pleasant and familiar. Judging by the position of the sun it was midafternoon. Beneath a blue sky stretched greenery: a savannah interspersed with scrawny trees. And nearby, recognisable to Heshke despite the intervening three centuries, were the Hathar Ruins, broken, crumbled and moss-covered.

“Notice anything?” Ascar said expectantly.

And Heshke did notice something. A raven was flying across their field of view – or rather, it was not flying. Close enough for every feather of its outspread wings to stand out distinctly, it was hanging in midair, frozen and motionless.

“It’s not moving,” he murmured in wonderment.

“That’s right.” Ascar seemed secretly gleeful. “We’re at a dead stop. Halted on one frozen instant.”

A thought occurred suddenly to Heshke “But if that were so we wouldn’t be able to see anything. Light would be frozen, too.”

Ascar gave a superior smile. “A clever inference, Citizen, but a wrong one. There’s no such thing as frozen light – its velocity is constant for all observers, which is the same as saying it’s not properly a velocity at all. Few laymen understand that.”

He gave a signal to the pilot. “Just the same, for practical purposes we need to explore an environment with all the features of our own, that is to say one that moves.”

The pilot did something on the control panel. The raven bolted into action, flapped its wings and flew away. The savannah stirred in the breeze.

“Now we are travelling futureward at the rate of one second per second: the normal rate of time we are used to. This rate will persist automatically. We can go outside now.”

The door hissed open, allowing fresh air into the cabin. Heshke moved to the rear of the cabin, picked up a movie vidcamera, a satchel of tools and a specimen bag. Then he followed Ascar into the open air.

There could be little doubt of it. The photographs dug up in Jejos weren’t faked; there was no coincidence, nothing that could account for them in accidental terms. They were pictures of the actual ruins he and Ascar stood in the midst of now.

Beyond them, on a grassy knoll, stood the time traveller, guarded by one of the Titan technical officers. The other officer had taken up a nearer position just outside the ruins and was scanning the landscape for signs of danger. God knew what kind of danger there could be here in the middle of nowhere, three hundred years back in limbo, but there he stood in the textbook standoff position.

It was hard to believe it: hard to believe that they were three hundred years into non-time. The air brought to Heshke’s nostrils all the freshness of summer, the sun shone down, and everything looked peacefully normal.

“Are you absolutely sure?” Ascar asked.

“Absolutely. I know these ruins like the back of my hand. I’ve been studying them for years. These are the Hathar Ruins, as I would expect them to be three centuries after our time. We must be in the future.”

“No, we’re in the past.” Ascar was frowning, a scowling frown of great agitation.

“Well.…” Heshke put his hand on a weathered alien wall, feeling the almost subconscious thrill he had noted so often. “Then we’re up against a paradox that would seem to support the Titan theory: that the past and the future have got mixed up somehow and nothing we see is real. But I have to say that personally I feel forced to reject even that theory. These remains are too perfect, too solid and incontrovertible in every detail. They have suffered three centuries of physical decay from the ruins of my time, and they have decayed exactly as I would expect.”

“But we are in the past,” Ascar insisted.

Heshke shouldered his vidcamera and shook his head sadly. “Come over here,” he invited.

Clambering over the massy stones, the physicist followed him into a grid-pattern of low walls which had the appearance of once having been a set of rooms. The archaeologist crouched down beside a wall where he had earlier pulled away a patch of moss.

“This clinches it,” he said, looking up at Ascar. “See these grooves?”

Ascar stooped. The sharp sunlight glinted on little fronds of moss, on dirt and sparkling stone, and made shadows in a number of short trenches cut in three blocks of stone, surrounding a third.

“Yes.”

“I myself helped to cut those grooves. We suspected there was an aumbry behind here – a cupboard cut in the wall. And we were right. Afterwards we replaced the sealing stone. Here, give me a hand.”

He took a couple of jemmies out of his tool satchel. Ascar helped him to lever away the slab. It came after a little effort, being not as thick or as solidly entrenched as it looked. Heshke shone a little light into the cavity thus revealed and moved aside so that Ascar could look.

“I’ll bet a year’s pay there’s some writing in there. See if you can find it.”

Ascar poked his head into the entrance. The recess was larger than its door suggested and smelled damp, but it was free of dust. On the opposite wall were some large letters, neatly cut with a powered stone inscriber.

“Skeleton thirty-one,” he read slowly. “Glass vessel four hundred eighty-nine.”

Heshke chuckled. “That’s right. I inscribed that message myself. It was to record what we had found in there and their catalogue numbers.”

Ascar stood up and took a deep breath.

“Well, there’s your proof,” Heshke told him. “Right now we are standing after our time, not before.”

“Well, you’re the expert,” Ascar said amiably. “I can’t argue with that.”

The time traveller surged forward, and Heshke relaxed, idly watching the flurry of shapes and colours through the windows and listening to the fuzzy hum of the time-drive. For the first part of the journey back to the research centre he had tried to talk to Leard Ascar; but the physicist had retreated into himself and now sat staring with glazed eyes at the floor, either stupefied or engaged in deep meditation.

He had asked the pilots that he be allowed to release the safety straps, since they appeared to be superfluous and made the journey even more tedious, but they had refused, explaining that the machine was liable to a sudden lurch if a rapid change in direction was called for.

He wondered how his report would be received by the Titan controllers of the research centre. Already he had communicated his findings to the pilots. They were well-trained and understood the implications. But with typical Titan superciliousness they’d made no comment.

Half resentfully, he stared at their broad, uniformed backs. These Titans had killed his friend Blare Oblomot, he reminded himself. He realised now that he had gone around anaesthetised since that event, as if in a dream… it was a happening he just hadn’t been able to take in properly. But then Blare, by his own admission, had been a traitor; inexplicably, a traitor.…

A gong rang out, in a different tone from that which had heralded the approach of their outgoing destination. The pilot spoke up for the passengers’ benefit.

“We’re approaching Absolute Present.”

Ascar jerked his gaze up from the floor. Just then the co-pilot murmured something to his colleague, who glanced down at the other’s section of the instrument panel.

“Citizen Ascar, we appear to have a malfunction on the Absolute Present register,” the pilot announced in a puzzled tone.

“Eh?” Ascar released himself from his straps and bounded forward to peer closely at the designated instrument. From where he was sitting Heshke could see it: a large strip-dial that had commenced to flash as the gong sounded. A marker moved steadily across it in a count-down toward zero: the travelling wave of time.

But now the marker was quivering and behaving erratically, first darting toward the zero and then retreating from it. “Without that register we’ll find it difficult to synchronise back into ‘now’,” the pilot warned.

“Malfunctioning, hell, it must be in order,” Ascar growled.

“It gives impossible readings,” the Titan corrected meticulously. “It’s obviously an instrument failure.”

Ascar froze for a moment. “Not impossible,” he said slowly. “It’s detecting the presence of real time, but not strongly enough for it to be absolute time. Hell, we ourselves carry a small fragment of time with us – as does every other time traveller!”

He stepped to a window and tuned it to near-transparency, peered through it briefly and then crossed the cabin to do the same on the other side. There, pacing them so as to stand out steadily against the kaleidoscope-like flurry, was a cylindrical shape rounded at both ends.

It duplicated perfectly the alien time traveller that had been shown to Heshke on film.

Cautiously he released his straps and joined Ascar at the window, peering fascinated through the glowing pane. He became aware that behind the dulled windows of the alien traveller there were undoubtedly eyes, alien eyes, that were watching them.

“Great Mother Earth!” one of the Titans swore softly.

Ascar swung around. “For God’s sake man – don’t let them track us to the Research Centre!”

The Titan understood him perfectly. “Back to your seats!” he ordered. But Heshke was still not secured properly when the traveller gave a sickening lurch and raced off into whatever other direction might conceivably exist – Heshke was confused on that point for the moment. He just saved himself from being toppled onto the floor and fastened the straps.

The Absolute Present register was flaring more brightly. “We shall synchronise with the present on a distant part of Earth, and make our way from there to the Centre by conventional means,” the Titan announced. “By that means we may hope to evade alien detection.”

“No,” said Ascar. “Keep going.”

“What for?” the other said sharply. “Our orders are to return to the Centre forthwith!”

“Keep going – on into the future.” Ascar’s voice was trembling with excitement. “There’s something I have to find out,” he said. “Something we all have to find out. So keep going!”

The pilot glanced over his shoulder, perturbed – as Heshke was – to see the physicist so in the grip of passion. “Are you suggesting that we depart from the flight plan, Citizen? That can not be allowed! Any suggestions you may have will have to be put before the controllers.”

“Yes, Titan ideologues who can’t see the facts even when they’re held up in front of their faces!” Ascar snarled, apparently in fury. “They’ll delay, delay, delay – by then it might be too late! Mankind will be finished!”

Ascar had again stood up. Heshke was alarmed to see that he had produced a gun from somewhere in his combat suit. With a cry Heshke also scrambled free of his straps and staggered forward, recklessly intending to tackle him. But at that moment Ascar lunged, seizing a handgrip on the control panel and swinging it far over. The time traveller accelerated wildly and overshot the Absolute Present to hurtle wildly futureward. The accompanying jolt sent Heshke reeling. He fell, hit his head violently against the arm of a chair, and blackness overwhelmed him.

He came round to find himself back in his seat, lolling against the straps. His head ached abominably. But the pain was soon forgotten in the horror and shock of what he saw.

The co-pilot was lying against one wall, evidently dead. The other Titan was disarmed and stood against the opposite wall, warily watching Ascar who was nonchalantly piloting the time traveller while keeping an eye on him.

“Uh – what happened?” Heshke rasped.

Ascar spared him a glance. “Welcome back. I’m afraid there was a scuffle. Lieutenant Hosk got shot. Wasn’t really my fault.” He spoke the last in a surly mumble

Heshke paused. “And the alien time traveller?”

“We lost it.” Ascar gave a tight, sinister grin. “I’ve been pushing this ship to its limit – close to a hundred and fifty years per hour.”

The words “You’re mad” died in Heshke’s throat.

“Where are we now?”

“Nearly four hundred years in the future.”

Heshke lay back in his seat, trying to fight off a feeling of hopelessness. Ascar’s mind had evidently snapped under the strain. He and the pilot would have to be patient and await their chance to overwhelm him.

“The future? What do you expect to find there?” he asked, stumbling over the words. “You said yourself it’s all dead and empty.”

“The facts are staring us in the face,” Ascar replied. “That’s the mark of the true scientist, isn’t it, Heshke? To take facts as facts even if they conflict with theory, and draw the most obvious deductions from them. That’s what we’ve been failing to do.”

“What facts are those?” Heshke glanced nervously at the Titan, who was watching Ascar warily.

“Chiefly, the plain fact that the alien interventionist ruins are ageing backward in time. If we take that at face value, then their source lies in the future, and we’re going to track it down.”

His words were interrupted by the sounding of the gong. The Absolute Present register began to glow, for the second time this trip.

“There she blows!” crowed Ascar.

The Titan’s jaw dropped. He stared at the register as though unable to believe his eyes.

“But we’re four centuries away from Absolute Present!”

“Four centuries from our Absolute Present.”

“There is only one,” the Titan insisted emptily. “Your own equations say so… you to whom we owe the secret of the time-drive…”

“Well, I can’t be right all the time,” Ascar said, rather bleakly. “What do you think I was doing for three hours while we made the journey back – just sitting there with a blank mind?” He snorted. “Oh no, I was going over those very equations you seem to regard as sacrosanct… and it occurred to me that I might not know as much about time as I had thought, and that the equations could be wrong. So I began to imagine a number of other possibilities. What if the Absolute Present isn’t unique, as I had formerly assumed it to be? Perhaps there are other waves of time, separated from our own by millions of years, by millennia – or only by centuries. Perhaps there is a regular series of them, forming the nodes of a cosmic wave frequency vibrating through the universe. Whatever the truth, I discovered that if I amended the equations to make room for any of these possibilities then the basic principle that makes the time-drive work remains unchanged… so the theoretical structure had to give way… even if the Great Earth Mother has to give way too.…”

While he spoke Ascar had been deftly flying the time traveller, dividing his attention between the instruments and his two hijacked passengers. His gun was never more than an inch or two away from his right hand.

He continued ramblingly. “And what if one of those other time waves was travelling in the opposite direction to our own? Not proceeding from the past into the future, as we understand time, but from the future into the past? The very words past and future tend to lose their meaning in such a context.… Whatever lies behind one’s direction of motion is the past and whatever lies in front of it is the future.… There it is!”

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, everywhere 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.