The Overlords of War

Chapter 22

Minos, the fabled judge of the dead. A tribunal from which there was no appeal… Corson was dreaming, and dimly knew that he was doing so. He pondered what he had heard, and thought now and then of Antonella.

Damned pacifists from the end of time, unable to do their own dirty work. We’re pawns between their fingers, the tyrants! Motionless, I spin and tumble between the meshes of this web of lives, dropped from the palm of a god. Do what you like, the god has decreed, but stop your row, stop these wars which spoil my dreams.

The web was woven of human bodies. Every knot was a man and each held in his hands the ankles of two other men. And so on to infinity. And these men, naked, fought and shouted insults, tried to scratch or pull close enough to bite. From time to time one lost his grip and was at once swallowed up in the abyss. A hole appeared, soon filled in by an incomprehensible slipping of the mesh. And Corson passed between their outspread limbs like an unseen fish.

He dreamed that he woke up. He was wandering in a vast and splendid city. Its towers climbed to the sky, not like masts but more like trees, dividing and forking to comb the wind. Its streets, like lianas, were thrown out over emptiness.

He felt an anguish grip his heart which at first he could not account for. Then the reason for his presence came back to him. There was a box hanging against his chest on a sling, and that was a machine for traveling in time. On each wrist he had a sort of watch, and those were chronometers built with the uncommon precision required if he were to read and master time. On the crystal of each watch was painted, or maybe engraved, a thin red line radiating from the center and marking an exact hour, minute, second. From the position of the long hand he could tell that barely five minutes remained before it would reach the red line. And on the upper side of the time-travel device, figures were displayed one after another to tell him the same thing, counting minutes and seconds and fractions of a second. He knew the machine was set to throw him into the past—or the future—just before the hand reached the line.

Red. Something terrible was about to happen. Yet in the city all was quiet. No one there guessed what was in store. And as the cause of his anguish grew clearer, as he remembered more of the details, he wondered how he could await the moment of his deliverance without starting to scream.

All quiet in the city. The wind rocked the hanging roads, the tapering branches of the towers, slowly back and forth. A woman played with a polished pendant around her neck. In a garden an artist was carving space. Children were chanting as they tossed into the air colored balls which revolved around each other before falling lazily to the ground. To Corson the dreamer, the city resembled a sculpture, almost immobile overall yet composed of microscopic elements individually in motion.

In less than two minutes the city would be destroyed by nuclear missiles that were already on the way, bellowing in the stratosphere, leaving in their wake the complaint of the space tortured by their drive. The imminence of destruction seemed incredible to the dreamer, yet its exact instant was marked on the crystals of the two watches. He knew that he would escape the destruction and retain only the image of the city at peace. He would not witness the brightness of a thousand suns and the melting of the towers like warm candles and the eruption of lava from the bowels of the earth and the vaporization of bodies before they had time to catch fire and later—much later—the shriek of tortured air. He would know of its destruction only as a distant event, something historical and abstract.

And then he realized something which he did not remember, which his time machine was incapable of sparing him.

It happened abruptly. The city was tranquil. Then the woman started to scream. She tugged so violently at the chain around her neck that she broke it and flung the polished metal plate away from her. The children fled in panic, weeping. A cry that the very city seemed to utter assailed the stranger. It sprang from millions of throats, millions of mouths. It challenged the high pale towers. It sounded nothing like a human voice.

Corson heard the city shriek like a great beast tearing itself apart, bursting into a multitude of frightened cells that no longer shared anything except terror.

He wanted to put his hands over his ears, but could not. Now he remembered. The inhabitants of this city could foretell the future, sense just a few moments ahead, and they knew what was going to happen.

They knew bombs were going to fall. They would scream until the explosions overtook them. They already perceived the fire and the fierce light and the utter darkness.

And he, the stranger, the dreamer, knew there was nothing he could have done, that he had had no chance to warn them. He had not even had time to tell them of their end before they saw it with their inward sight. He was not to see the city die, but he was hearing it scream.

The long hand had nearly reached the fine red line, but it seemed to the stranger, the dreamer, that this final instant was lasting dreadfully long. A frightful thought jolted his mind: suppose the device on his chest was not a time machine? Suppose he was merely one of the inhabitants of the city, doomed like all of them to disappear?

He opened his mouth. The time machine operated. He was saved. Alone. Completely alone.

He was somewhere else and the cry was no longer audible. He tried to recall it. He knew he was dreaming and that he had had this dream before. On his wrists the two infallible chronometers marked an inexorable and identical time. He was the master of time. Before him lay a low and level city furrowed with canals, stretching along the shore of a violet sea.

He began to moan, alone, in silence which was barely disturbed by the song of birds. Someone very far off turned toward him, not understanding.