Collision with Chronos

6

A hush fell on the gathering in a quiet room in a derelict back street. Sobrie Oblomot stared at the tabletop, slightly embarrassed by the sympathy he felt emanating from the others.

“Sorry, Oblomot,” the Chairman said, somewhat awkwardly. “But at least your brother died like a comrade. Went out with a bang. And took four Titans with him.”

“That’s not as self-sacrificing as it sounds,” said Sobrie stiffly. “I’d commit suicide as well, rather than face what those bastards have waiting in Bupolbloc Two.”

The Group Leader from Kansorn nodded. “The Titans have been coming down hard lately. I admit I wake up sweating sometimes. I never go without my s-grenade, either.”

“I concur,” said the man sitting next to him. He wore a mask and spoke through a voice modifier, being a person of such public prominence, and besides this of such importance to the League, that his anonymity was deemed essential.

“The League is reeling under the Titans’ blows,” he said. “Nearly three hundred people arrested in the past few months. The antipodean networks are practically destroyed. If this continues I fear for our whole cause.”

The depression of the League members was palpable. The Chairman shuffled his feet and spoke more forcefully.

“There is less cause for alarm than many of you think,” he told them. “The reprisals are a sign of our growing strength, not of our weakness. Remember what a low ebb we were at twenty years ago – at one time the Panhumanic League was down to about fifty members.” He smiled ruefully. “Its very name was a joke. That was during the wars. But, after a long period of peace, we’ve been able to expand our activities and increase our influence. It was inevitable that there would be a Titan reaction to our successes.”

“That’s true,” the Kansorn Group Leader said. “Our only problem is how we’re going to meet it. Everything depends on our riding out the storm.”

The Chairman nodded. “And that brings me to the main item of our remaining business. At the last meeting it was suggested that League membership should be barred to people of mixed blood. The reason for this, you will remember, was to protect our public image” – he spoke as if the words were distasteful to him – “so that we should not be characterised, as we have been, as an organisation of ‘squalid freaks and sub-men’. I take it we have all considered the motion?”

“I’m against it,” answered one voice with passion. “It runs counter to all our ideals. It suggests that we too consider other subspecies of mankind to be inferior. We shouldn’t play the Titans’ racist game.”

“I’m for it,” said the member from Kansorn, “merely on the grounds of tactics, as stated.”

“How many of our people do have mixed blood?” Sobrie asked suddenly.

The Chairman answered. “The statistical department gives a figure of twenty per cent. A significant proportion – one which can give weight to anti-League propaganda.”

“Propaganda is the least of our worries,” grumbled the Kansorn Group Leader. “The Titan campaign against mixed blood is gathering pace, too. These half-breeds and octoroons give them a road leading right into the heart of the League. By moving against one, they move against the other.”

“These people also see the League as their protection,” Sobrie pointed out. “If we expel them, we can hardly count on their loyalty. We’ll be twice as exposed as before.”

“There’s another aspect to the business,” said the voice that had spoken previously. “Are we also to discontinue our contacts with the dev reservations?”

After a strained pause, the Chairman said: “We may, in any case, have to scale down our activities in the reservations. Titan supervision of these areas is so strict that they’re becoming weak points in our networks – a number of agents have been apprehended trying to pass in or out. Even the imprisoned peoples have become wary of our approaches. Many of them have given up all hope of freedom and merely want to be left to live as best they can.”

Several members snorted in disgust. The idea of any kind of future at the mercy of Titan hatreds, of Titan scientists and land-utilisation experts (always pressing to contract the already small areas “lost to True Man”) was, to their minds, ridiculous.

They turned to the masked man, whose opinion, despite his anonymity, carried great weight. He pondered.

“The benefits to be gained from such a drastic step would probably not be great enough to justify the defying of our principles,” he stated finally. “In the long run, it would do little to dispel the legend of the Dark Covenant.”

Yes, thought Sobrie Oblomot, the Dark Covenant: the incredibly subtle, fantastically detailed scheme to destroy True Man that had supposedly been created hundreds of years ago by the combined evil geniuses of all the deviant subspecies then extant. The League was fairly sure that no such document, nor any document or plan even vaguely approximating it, had ever existed. But the beliefs that had grown up around it were elaborate and fascinating, and they were encouraged by the Titanium Legions. Popular belief had it that the Panhumanic League itself was but part of one of the Covenant’s contingency plans, following the initial failure to exterminate True Man altogether and replace him by nature’s mistakes… by the Earth Mother’s mutants, sports and abortions.

It was the kind of inanity that made Sobrie Oblomot despair that the League could ever achieve its aim of bringing rationality to civilisation.

While the argument went on his thoughts returned – as they had returned every few moments since his hearing the news – to his brother Blare. Suicide, he thought bleakly. Gone in the glare of a fiery explosion when arrested by Titans. It would look fine in some annals after the battle was won, or on a monument in a better world. But here, in the squalor of an underground struggle, it seemed merely… bleak.

Blare had been an active member of the League for only a short time, and Sobrie was eaten up with guilt because it was he who had put his brother there. His hints, his persuasion, his appeals to reason, had won Blare over to the side of subversion. Not that it had been very difficult, but just the same Blare was too much of an ingenuous idealist, too much of a moral simpleton, to be successful in his work. Sobrie could see that clearly now. He shouldn’t have pushed him into it. It shouldn’t have been Blare who went up in that s-grenade. It should have been him, Sobrie.

The Chairman called an end to discussion and held a vote. The motion was narrowly defeated.

There was more discussion on tactics. It was decided to break up some groups and to scatter their members to various parts of the globe, where they were to remain inactive until further orders. The Chairman ended with a brief item.

“This is connected with your brother, Oblomot,” he said. “As you may know, he was working with Rond Heshke, the famous archaeologist, on the alien ruins at Hathar. It seems that on the night your brother died, Heshke was taken by the Titans as well.”

“I didn’t know he was connected with the League.” Sobrie frowned.

“He isn’t. As far as we know Heshke is an upright citizen who holds a certificate of racial purity. We’ve learned that he was taken to Cymbel and put on board a private rocket transport. We’re not sure, but we think the transport landed in the Sarn Desert.”

“So?” Sobrie stared at him.

“The Titans have a secret research establishment there,” the Chairman divulged. “They guard it so jealously that we haven’t been able to find out what goes on in the place. But the fact that Rond Heshke may now be on the staff would confirm that it’s connected with the alien interventionists in some way.”

“And the aliens are also of interest to us,” murmured Sobrie, nodding.

“Correct. We, as much as anyone else, would like to know who they were, where they came from, and what kind of beings they were. It’s possible that racial fanaticism on Earth results from the antagonism between man and the alien. If so, our psychologists say that fear of the alien will have to be rooted out before hatred of other subspecies dies away.”

Heads nodded. This theorem was known to them all. It did not, in fact, take a psychologist to be able to see it.

“I mention this only because we’d like more information, and it’s proving hard to obtain directly,” the Chairman ended airily. “Pass the word through your networks: does anyone know of any supplies being sent to the Sarn Desert? If so, what sort of supplies? By the way, the situation is made to look more interesting by the dramatic way Rond Heshke was suddenly picked up from Hathar.”

The masked man gave a hollow laugh. “That means nothing. The Titans love drama.”

“Yes, perhaps –” The Chairman turned suddenly as the door opened behind him, a pistol leaping into his hand.

But it was only the guard. “There’s a report of Titan patrols in the area, Chairman. Thought you had better know.”

“Thank you. You’d best get away, and tell the street observers to do the same.”

The door closed behind the guard. “We’ll wind it up now, for safety’s sake,” the Chairman ordered quickly. “Is anyone without a cover?”

Sobrie held up his hand. Being an artist, he was generally obliged to travel without being able to supply any particular reason. The others would all have equipped themselves with business or personal cover-motives for being in Cymbel. Most of them would be attending the World Economic Integration Conference Preliminary Hearings – the reason why Cymbel had been chosen for this meeting.

“Right, you leave first,” the Chairman ordered. “If the guard’s still here ask him to guide you past the patrols, and leave the city right away.” He glanced around the table. “You’ll all be notified of the next meeting.”

Without ceremony Sobrie left the room. The others would follow at ten-minute intervals, the masked man leaving last of all.

The guard had already vanished. Sobrie checked the alley outside, then slipped from the derelict building. He strode quickly, almost running, until he reached the narrow defile that gave out on to a main thoroughfare.

The Titans had probably cottoned on to the fact that planet-wide conventions were a good opportunity for clandestine meetings, he thought. The Chairman would have to think of something else.

He saw one or two uniformed Titans about, but guessed that most of them were in civilian clothes. It was not hard to spot the tall, fair-haired young men by the cold, supercilious way they scanned the faces of passersby. Probably there were some people known to them that they were hoping to find.

He forced himself not to cringe as he walked by them. He was still worried by his obvious association with his own brother. But that had been weeks ago, and there had come no knock in the night. He could only presume that he had covered his tracks well. And the one track he had not covered, Blare had covered for him. With an s-grenade.

He arrived at Cymbel’s large transport field and bought a seat on the next rocket to Sannan. He had over an hour to wait, so he had a drink to calm his nerves, then decided the reception lounge wasn’t the best place to be hanging around. He went into the district adjoining the field, wandered around for a few minutes and went into a public drinking lounge. After a couple more drinks he felt better.

There was really nothing to be afraid of, he told himself. The Chairman was simply being overcautious – a wholly admirable strategy. The Panhumanic League hadn’t gone through over a century of experience without learning how to survive.

Several drinks later the rocket roared off from the transport field with Sobrie aboard. During the two-hour flight, arcing up above the best part of the atmosphere, he tried to sleep; but his head ached and he thought constantly of his brother.

It was an autumn evening when the rocket planed down into his native city of Sannan. It was a beautiful city, untouched by the dev wars. Rows of apartment blocks marched across the skyline, shining with muted colours in the slanting sunlight. Challenging them for prominence were the domes and towers of cathedrals, once centres of the old religions for which Sannan had been famous. These religions had been discouraged and were practically defunct now; the cathedrals were used for Titan pageants and for ceremonies revering the Earth Mother.

He left the transport field, his head clearing slightly in the fresh evening air, and took the tubeway to his own district. With a feeling of sanctuary he walked into his apartment, into the welcoming presence of Layella, the woman he lived with.

There were times when Sobrie felt weary of everything, weary of the cause he lived for, and felt tempted to give way to the persistent social pressure and to think: to hell with it, let’s just live comfortably. What does it matter what happens to those others? That was how everyone else thought. The Titans, after all, are only working for the good of us, of real people. It can’t be helped what happens to those others.

But then he would look again at Layella and renew his faith. She was one reason why he would probably never, not at any price, give up the cause. For Layella was of mixed blood.

Racially impure. Part Amhrak.

The percentage was not large – she herself did not know if it came from a grandparent or a great-grandparent, or even if some recessive genes had happened to come to the top – and because of her skilful use of cosmetics it passed unnoticed by the average citizen. Sobrie, by long loving acquaintance, was familiar with the differences and was eternally fascinated by the off-beat beauty they gave her. She had the small head and rounded cranium of the Amhraks – though not to an exaggerated degree – and the round, soft eyes, which she contrived to flatten a little with eye-paint. One dangerous feature was her ears, and therefore she kept them hidden beneath her hair, which was a soft, neatly cut shell of orange. Her skin shade was wrong, too – tending slightly towards Amhrak red – and for this she used a skin dye.

Other small differences in body proportion and stance she accentuated away by attention to her dress.

Provided life was quiet and uneventful she was safe. They could not marry, of course, since to be legally married both parties were required to obtain racial purity certificates, but otherwise no one of average percipience would know her apart from a True Woman.

But Sobrie knew – they both knew – that she could never pass muster if examined by the anthropometricians, the Titans’ racial experts. They would come along with their tapes and calipers. They would measure her nose, her cranium, a hundred and one bodily measurements. They would apply a chemical to her skin to bleach away any dye and measure the skin-tone with a colouro-meter. They would take some hair to test for disguised crinkliness. They would strip her and observe the configuration of her bones when she walked, when she sat on a chair, and if they wanted to be exhaustive they would take a retinal photograph and run a chromosome test.

But more probably, he thought, they would do scarcely any of those things. They would not have to hunt so far to identify her. Some of these race experts, so he had heard, were real masters who by their own boast could “tell blood at a glance”. They would take one look at her, and tell her to walk across the room, or else put a chair in the middle of the room and make her sit on it, noting the position of her buttocks. And they would know. And they would take her away and give her a painless injection, or perhaps worse, send her to the Amhrak reservation.

He flung himself down on a couch, exhausted by the content of the day, and waited while she brought him a soothing bowl of soup. Then he told her about Blare.

Her sympathy, thankfully, was not embarrassing, as that of his League comrades had been. She knew his moods and his needs, as if by an instinct. She sat beside him, a hand touching his thigh, and said little.

He drank the soup quickly and leaned back with a doleful sigh.

“Layella,” he said with difficulty, “we must part.”

Her eyes widened with alarm. “Why?”

“It’s getting too dangerous.” He sought for words to make her understand. In some ways she was strangely oblivious to the danger that had surrounded her, almost since birth. Just like Blare, he thought with a sudden feeling of surprise.

He had steadfastly refused to let Layella join the League herself, though from their conversation she knew a good deal of his business with them – he was unable to refrain from sharing that side of him with his mate. But he had become more and more aware that he himself comprised the greatest threat to her existence. If he was pulled in, she would have no chance of escape.

“I don’t want more people to go down on account of me,” he said bluntly.

“More people? What do you mean?”

“Don’t you see why Blare killed himself?” he said, looking up at her and trying to keep the note of agony out of his voice.

“You would all have to,” she soothed. “It’s necessary.”

“No, no, you don’t understand.” He clenched his fists. “Blare is – was – not the suicidal type. He would have hung on for as long as he could. He’s an optimist. He wouldn’t have killed himself right away – and yet that’s what he did. Almost as soon as they picked him up, before he could really have known how much they knew. He did it for me. So that he wouldn’t be able to betray me. If it comes to that, I was the only person he could have betrayed. He had no direct connection with anybody else.”

Both were silent for long moments. “You see why we must split up,” he said heavily. “We’ve taken risks for far too long. I don’t want to be the cause of your death, too.”

“You’re Blare’s brother,” she pointed out. “If they were suspicious they would have been here by now.”

“How do we know they’re not watching?” he rejoindered. “Still, we’re a large family, and scattered. They may not suppose a connection. But that’s not the point. They’re still liable to get me some day. That’s why you must go.”

“No,” she said with firmness, taking his arm. “You’re my… husband, or whatever. I’m staying with you, to take whatever comes.”

He stood up abruptly and paced the room, looking out of the wide window at the lights of the city, coming on in clusters and masses in the gathering dusk. “What a mess,” he said, feeling his fatigue. “Those goddamned Titans – causing all this tyranny. There’s nowhere you can go in the whole world and live like a free man.”

“It’s not really their fault,” Layella said mildly, her expression open. “True Man, as they call it, probably didn’t start all this. It was probably the Lorenes.”

“No, it wasn’t the Lorenes,” said Sobrie agitatedly. “It was even before that. It was the aliens – their invasion started all this insanity. But for them, the races of mankind would probably be living in peace together. Before the aliens came, they probably did live in peace together.”

She came over to him and stood behind him, her arms around his waist. At his back he could feel her voluptuous breasts, her head on his shoulder. From where he was standing he could see through the door into his small studio, littered with canvasses and plastic composites. Many of the paintings were of Layella. He thought bitterly of the studies of her he did not dare to paint, for fear that someone might see them: paintings of Layella without disguising cosmetic, in the nude, betraying the proportions between torso and hips. He thought of the children they did not dare to have, for fear of what might become of them.

Everything seemed hopeless. Nothing would be achieved in his lifetime; all the gains made by the Panhumanic League, important though they seemed within the League itself, were objectively trivial. Sobrie remembered what the Chairman had reiterated so many times: that they were working toward a goal that could not be achieved for several centuries; that their sights must be set that far ahead.

“Listen,” Layella said. “I couldn’t stand it if we parted. It would be too much of a blow for me. Leave the League if you like, if you can’t stand it any more. We’ll go away somewhere where we won’t be traced to our life here. Not that I’m asking you to. But don’t send me away.”

“All right,” said Sobrie. “Stay if you insist. If you can accept what it might mean. But I won’t leave the League. The League comes before everything.”

The meeting that took place far away, in a great castle some miles outside the city of Pradna, was far removed in style from the furtive sessions of the Panhumanic League.

The Titanium Legions were well-advanced in pomp; each high-backed chair bore a nameplate of titanium edged with gold, engraved with the name of its occupant. The table around which the chairs were set was of mahogany with inlaid platinum, while the walls were hung with tapestries depicting inspirational themes: representations of the Earth Mother with her strong, upright son; scenes of past glory – crucial moments in historic battles.

The Legionary Council of Generals convened once a year as a matter of course, or whenever Planetary Leader Limnich dictated. As he entered, all the Council members were at their places with eyes closed, deep in one of the spiritual exercises they all practised, especially during their sojourns at the castle. Planetary Leader Limnich insisted on these practices among his generals; he knew them to be proven strengtheners of the will. They had been handed down from ancient times – but only to a privileged few – by True Men deeply experienced in spirituality.

“Attention.”

Limnich spoke the word quietly but incisively as the big oak doors closed with a barely audible thump behind him. He was a man of below average height for a Titan, pale-faced, with a receding though blue-jowled chin, bulbous cheeks, and fish-cold eyes behind the large round lenses he preferred to more fashionable contact lenses.

The generals opened their eyes with a snap, summoned from their meditation, and stood to attention while Planetary Leader Limnich seated himself at the head of the table. Then, stiffly, they seated themselves again.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” greeted Limnich in a distant, but conversational tone. “You must be wondering why I’ve convened the Council at this particular time, when our annual retreat together is so near. As you may guess, there’s news of import. But first, I’ll hear your reports.”

One by one the generals gave a brief résumé. The accounts were no more than recapitulations – each man commanded a vast area of activity and his real reports were massive documents handled by computers. But Limnich was never one to skimp on ritual. He bent his head to give closest attention to the remarks dealing with the pursuit of the Panhumanic League and the hunting down of racially impure persons, numbers of which still existed in normal society, even years after the last of the deviant wars.

“The work is long and arduous, but its conclusion is inescapable, gentlemen,” he commented. “It must be prosecuted with unremitting vigour. Earth’s destiny is dependent on a one hundred per cent purity of racial stock… but now to the main burden of my information tonight.…”

In the dimly lit chamber, whose illumination was supplied by shaded cressets, his voice fell to a dramatic murmur, the tone of voice he used on his extremely rare vidcasts – Planetary Leader Limnich was the most powerful man on Earth, but he was the power behind the throne, not the man on the throne itself. Ostensibly his title referred only to his command of the Titanium Legions. There was a World Racial President, a civilian, whom the Legions were sworn to protect. But in actuality Limnich handled nearly all practical affairs, and made nearly all important decisions, though frequently after conferring with the President.

“You all know of the work being undertaken at the Sarn Establishment, and of the discoveries that have been made there,” he said, placing both hands on the table and directing his gaze at the shining mahogany. “You were all informed, by secret memo, of the mysterious disappearance of our first functional time travelling machine, together with Chief Physicist Leard Ascar and archaeologist Rond Heshke.

“The loss of Ascar is a blow to our efforts, since his genius was instrumental in developing time theory, but luckily developments had already reached a stage where we were no longer dependent on him. We were able to bring our Marks Two and Three machines into use fairly quickly, and a search was undertaken for the expedition that failed to return. It was established that the expedition had actually landed at its destination. But although the whole of the route covered in the flight plan was thoroughly searched, as well as its environs and possible alternative routes that might have been taken in an emergency, no sign of the machine itself could be found.”

He paused, lifting his eyes to glower through his lenses like some frightening goblin. “We formed the conclusion that the machine had been intercepted by alien interventionists, and its occupants kidnapped.”

A tremor of consternation went around the table; backs stiffened. This was the stuff of which nightmares were made – the nightmares they had all experienced at some time since childhood, of strange beasts that dragged their victims into the abyss. And there was no abyss more bottomless, or more unknown, than that of time.

“Taking account of the possibility that the prisoners might be made to reveal the whereabouts of the Sarn Establishment, I immediately ordered the dispersal of its activities around the globe and the rapid building-up of our time travelling capabilities. With a determined allocation of resources, it was possible to bring to completion about twenty apparatuses and in the ensuing weeks a good start was made toward a more complete exploration of our time environment.

“Early on, one of the time machines was fired upon while in flight and destroyed. I had, however, given orders that the machines were only to travel in squadrons of three or more. The victim’s companions gave chase to its attacker and pursued it into the future, where they lost track of it. Later, more signs of the aliens’ presence were found, and revealed a situation of utmost danger. It seems that the aliens are extremely active in time, not only in the past, and in our present, but in the future also.”

“The future, Leader? But how can that be?” One of the burly Titan generals, a man in his sixties, turned to Limnich in puzzlement. He was like many of these older Titans who had been born and bred in the deviant wars. His life had been one of conquest and heedless force, and he had difficulty in understanding these abstract concepts.

Limnich himself recognised his generals’ limitations in the context of the modern world. Some of these old-time soldiers, he told himself, would have to be phased out. They would need to be replaced by younger men of greater sophistication. Men who understood theory, as well as the necessity for action.

“There is increasing evidence that the enemy has established a massive base some centuries in the future,” he replied. “Presumably he believes himself to be out of the reach of retaliation there – but he is wrong!” His pale fish-like features suddenly burning with passion, Limnich thumped the table with his fist. “Gentlemen, what I am trying to tell you is that we must once again put ourselves on a wartime footing. The second confrontation with the alien, which we have suspected would come one day, is imminent.”

And the gleam of excitement that followed his words swept aside any incomprehension that might have bedevilled the Titanium Council. Here was one thing they did understand – and gloried in.

War!

“You will set to work in all your sectors to bring industry up to the pace of wartime production,” Limnich told them more calmly. “Specific blueprints will be issued shortly, when we’ve trained sufficient technical teams in the new science of time manipulation. I’ve already taken the steps that will lead to the creation of time travel equipment on a large scale. This will result in new battalions being raised for the Titanium Legions: battalions trained and equipped to wage war across the centuries.” He paused again, and launched into the evocative language he could never resist on such occasions. “Mother Earth is once again calling her offspring to her defence. We must gird our loins, muster our strength, and strike before we’re overwhelmed by the alien onslaught that we must assume is being prepared. There’s no time for rest: we’re entering upon a new era of conflict.”

Limnich rose to his feet, paused with dignity while the assembly too, rose, and arms shot out, hooking themselves with clenched fists in the Titan salute. Then, without a further word, he turned and walked quietly from the chamber.