"This
picture is taken a hundred years from now. The disaster it records, on the face
of it, is going to happen within the next few months. And it isn't local. Just
look at the mountain chain outside the cave. . . ."
The time: now.
The
speaker: the chief of a top secret U.S. time probe project.
The place: a guarded cavern in Tennessee.
The discovery: utter planetary catastrophe on its way.
The
volunteer: a man to go forward into the future to determine
(a) what caused the end of the world,
(b) what could be done to prevent it.
The
price: his life, his girl's life, his country's life, his world's life.
REX
GORDON writes: "My
readers do not write to compliment me on the way I have used some fancy and unlikely
scientific theory to produce a trick ending. What they want to know is, will it
really be like that; is that true; is that what modern scientific thinking may
mean to us? They want to know which way life is going, and so do I. They want
to know what aspects of life are permanent and what are likely to turn out to
be merely the current superstitions and social mores of our place and time.
"I have to be on my toes to keep up with
them and to produce books which are fit and worthy for them to read. But it is
an exciting and demanding game, and when I think how H. G. Wells' sociological
fantasies have affected the modern world, and how the Utopias of the past from
Plato to Samuel Butler have affected modern thinking, I do not think it is a
useless one. Frankly, I think the critics are stupid when they fail to see in
science-fiction some of the most important writing of our time. For
science-fiction belongs to that class of literature that is read by people who
are tolerant, who know how little we know, but who have guts and who
think."
THROUGH
TIME
REX GORDON
ACE
BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York 36, N.Y.
first
through time
Copyright ©, 1962, by Ace Books, Inc. All
Rights Reserved
Ace Books by Rex Gordon include:
FIRST
ON MARS (D-233) FIRST TO THE STARS (D-405)
I
We were coming out from the rock tunnels of the synchrotron,
out into the morning sunlight and the view across Lake Valley from below the cliff face.
A
man came across from the apron where we had parked the cars. He walked between
Sara and Strassen and put his hand upon my shoulder.
He said, "Conference,
Judgen."
"What
conference?" I said.
"Galbraith
will be at the conference," he said, "and so will all the important
people." He took me to his car.
He
was the man who had welcomed me, stepping out from nowhere, when I had arrived
at the university the previous night. Maybe it was because he had not had time
then, that he had not explained who he was and why.
The
'important people' apparently did not include Strassen or Sara Francis. They
were left behind when he closed his car door, started it, and drove towards the
road that wound up the valley side to the university.
"Curiosity
is frowned on in this part of the country," I said. "And people don't
ask questions."
"What do you want to
know?" he said.
"Your name," I said. "Or,
failing that, if I'm to take orders from you, your rank and status."
"Carl Reckman," he said.
"Military intelligence.''
He put the car into the
bends on the winding road.
"What has military
intelligence to do with this?" I said.
"This
work is being done under an appropriation for military intelligence now,"
he said. "It has to be done under some appropriation. You ask the
Senator."
"What Senator?"
He said, "You'll meet
him."
There was a helicopter parked on the grass
between the buildings of the university. There were also two large cars with
uniformed drivers. I wondered if the government was moving in.
Out of the car, Reckman led me up a flight of
marble steps. "They're holding it in the projection room," he said.
"There's that about a university. It has the places."
A man at the door looked closely even at
Reckman before he let us in. Inside, the lights were on in a room with a
projector and a screen. I saw Galbraith's great gray head even before I saw his
hunched and shambling untidy figure. There were three other men, one in
General's uniform.
It
is hard to describe the impression Galbraith had made on me. We had had
scientists, engineers and technicians of all descriptions at the rocket base,
and I had thought he would be one of them. He wasn't. It was not a difference
in quality. He was a different kind of man. In some ways he was more homely and
less restrained. At other times, while he went on using the simplicities of
ordinary speech, you found he was losing you in the most complicated matters
which he all too obviously expected you to easily understand.
"Here
are Reckman and Major Judgen now," he said. He looked at his projectionist
who was fixing a film in his machine. "Shall we put the lights out? We may
as well begin."
There
was a slight delay while the introductions were performed.
"Major,
this is Secretary Stephens," Reckman said. "The Major is our
volunteer, Mr. Secretary. If anyone does this thing, he will. Senator, this is
Major Howard Judgen . . ."
I was saluting. I had recognized General
Bridger. It was not from previous personal acquaintance. I had seen his
picture. Who hasn't? The sight and fact of him there gave me a new idea of the
importance of whatever it was we were trying to do. It put it in a new class.
"Are you a volunteer,
Major?" the General asked me.
"I
don't know yet, sir," I told him. "I don't know what I am
volunteering for."
He
grinned, making all those assumptions that Generals are inclined to make.
Secretary
Stephens was making an objection to Galbraith, who, to move us to the chairs,
was having his projectionist put the lights out one by one.
"I
don't see why you want us to see this film, Professor. Film reports and
scientific records of experiments are surely a matter of evaluation by the
experts."
"Experts
aren't deciding whether we send a man instead of cameras next time, Mr.
Stephens," Galbraith said. For a moment he looked past the Secretary at
me, and then at the General beside me. It was obvious whom he thought would do
the deciding. I wondered why the Secretary and the Senator were there at all.
As Reckman had said, I soon found out. We were moving to the chairs. Galbraith's
personality or whatever it was worked. He was treating us as a captive
audience.
The
Senator and the Secretary were fretting. At their level of government they must
have thought it a departure from custom to begin a conference with an attempt
to learn facts directly. "How am I to tell the appropriations
committee?" the Senator said. "I can't just tell them that it's a
matter of bookkeeping, the transfer to Intelligence of an item of equipment
costing a hundred million dollars."
"You can tell them it's secret,"
Galbraith said. "We're very secret here. If there are questions, tell them
the truth, that even we don't know quite what we're doing." And he nodded
to his projectionist who put the final light out. He said: "Why should we
be able to explain it?"
We sat in the dark looking towards the blank
screen, not like a conference so much as a university class that had come to hear a lecture. Then the screen came
to life.
I recognized the picture. I had just come
from there. It was the big underground laboratory at the target end of the
synchrotron. But Galbraith had to tell the others.
"This
is where we actuate the controls and work when the synchrotron is in
operation," he said. "You can see that we, the operating staff, are
all on one side of a barrier wall. Everything that happens around the target is
dealt with by that robot machinery you can see on the other side. Even this
camera that took these pictures could have been shielded had we thought it
necessary."
The screen showed us a picture of the human operating side of the laboratory as we watched it
in the darkened room. Galbraith himself could be seen in the picture, controlling
and observing the experiment. William Strassen was standing near the barrier
wall. Sara Francis was sitting at the control desk watching the many dials and
switches of the synchrotron itself.
The
camera showed her hand hovering over the many dials and switches and then swung
up and showed us a clock
on the wall over her head reading three minutes to noon.
"This is an actual experiment,"
Galbraith said. "Our most recent and most rewarding, if you can call it
that. It is what made me call you here. That girl is Sara Francis, a young assistant. We use her because she has
perfectly mastered the art of setting up the situation in which these events
happen. I am not telling you this for human interest. She features later in the
film."
The
camera evidently swung again, for the picture of the laboratory swung and we
found ourselves looking across the barrier wall. The screen showed us the
target area of the synchrotron. But the "target", if it could be
called that, at the point the beam would strike, was another camera and a group of instruments, on a plinth, under an
inverted glass bowl or bell-jar.
The other camera was trained back on the
laboratory so that while the one that had taken the film we were seeing saw it,
it would in turn look back at our camera, at the clock on the laboratory wall,
and at Sara, Strassen and Galbraith.
"Two cameras watching one another,"
Galbraith said. "And what is more, two clocks."
The
screen showed us a close-up of the camera and instruments inside the bell-jar
and one of them was a clock, the time on which corresponded with that of the
clock on the wall of the laboratory.
The other instruments were a thermometer, a barometer, and a radiation meter, all of the recording type.
"The
aim is to put a man in the place of those instruments,"
Galbraith said.
In the semi-darkness of the projection room,
visible only from the light reflected by the screen, everyone was watching
intently. The screen now showed us a general view of Sara adjusting her
controls and closing switches and of the laboratory clock at noon, and then
once again it showed us the bell-jar in the target area on the other side of
the wall with the second camera and the instruments inside it.
At
first nothing seemed to happen. Bell-jar and instruments looked lifeless as
the power of the synchrotron was directed on them. Then the hands of one of
them came to life and began to move. It was the clock.
Only
a few seconds had passed, and yet the small clock among the instruments was
registering three minutes past the hour. The movement of the hands became
visible after that. They moved round the clock face with increasing speed. I
looked at the other instruments. The radiation meter was up a bit, but not to
an extent to endanger human life.
"What
is this?" Secretary Stephens said. "Have you speeded up the
film?"
The
camera answered him. The screen's view of the laboratory tilted and swung and
we saw Sara again, watching her control desk carefully, and the wall clock
behind her. The wall clock said two minutes after twelve, but when the view
returned to the target again, the clock among the instrumerits in the bell-jar
was reading one o'clock and the hands were speeding on.
Something else was happening too. It was as
though a mist, a cloud, was forming in quite a large area around the bell-jar.
It made any observation of the clock, the second camera, and the other
instruments inside the bell-jar difficult. The clock among the instruments
could just be seen to be reading something to three and then it was obscured by
a darkening fog.
What
we were seeing now was a misty sphere, perhaps five feet in diameter, that
totally enclosed the bell-jar. And the sphere darkened. It became opaque.
Gradually, it became wholly black, as though we were seeing a hole in space.
Thinking
of what Galbraith had said about putting a man in the place of those
instruments, camera and clock that had disappeared, I could not say I liked it.
I did not see why they should do it, either.
"That
is what happens," said Galbraith. "The instruments go. We keep the
experiment in operation for half an hour, and then release, and they come back.
Now I propose to show you the same thing, and further, as it is recorded on the
second camera's film."
He
gave orders to the projectionist to stop the film he was showing, which was
showing a static scene in the laboratory, and transfer to the film that had
been taken from the second camera on its return.
"You
have a volunteer who will go and sit there, in the target area of your
synchrotron, and let that sphere form round him?" the Senator said.
"In what are you trying to involve the government? In licensed
suicide?"
"If
the recording instruments say a man can survive, then he can survive," the
General said. "Major Judgen and his kind have been into all that in their
experiments for outer space."
It
was dark and then light and then dark again in the projection room as the
operator switched spools in his projector, and then we were watching film
again.
This time it was the film taken by the camera
inside the bell-jar.
It looked the same to begin with. There was
Galbraith and Strassen, with Sara at the control desk, and the clock above her
head that said noon, all taken from the point of view I would have if I were
sitting out there in the "hot" side of the laboratory and looking
back at them through the mirrors above the barrier wall.
But this camera did not shift around as the
other had. Wc had to watch for ourselves. We could see Sara making the final
movements on her board in response to a word from Galbraith, and then it was
the laboratory wall clock above her that speeded up.
I looked at it and looked again. Its hands
too were going round the dial with increasing speed. And then I saw something
odd in Strassen's movements as he appeared on the screen. He was adjusting some
of the robot handling machinery they kept in position around the target area,
and he had to go from one part of the laboratory to another. He moved jerkily
and with increasing, and then with fantastic speed.
Secretary
Stephens said: "Wait! There's something wrong! If it were true that time
in that fishbowl from which this film was taken was speeded up, then this clock
should be shown going slower, not faster!"
"You see why I wanted you to see for
yourself," said Galbraith.
"He's
right!" said the Senator. "Here you've got two clocks speeding up,
each when seen from the other's viewpoint. It casts doubt on your whole
experiment!"
"I'd
agree if we knew anything about time," Galbraith said. "It seems we
don't."
"Before
this, no one's succeeded in affecting it in any way," said Bridger.
Even
Reckman spoke up diffidently. "We had our experts puzzle about
this," he said. "They talked of different and divergent
time-tracks."
Galbraith
made no comment. I thought perhaps he did not want to get into an argument with
the Intelligence experts. He had been simpler. He had just said he did not know
the answer.
But
arguments and questions were stopped by what was happening on the screen. In
the other film we had seen a dark opaque sphere form around the camera out of
which we were now looking. But the camera in the target did not record it that
way. What was obscuring the view' of the laboratory and of the clock, which
said twenty to three by then, and of the view of the blurred, uncertain darting
shapes of Sara, Galbraith and Strassen (we were getting pictures of them even
after the experiment was over, Strassen told me later), was a luminous, pearly
mist.
The
screen suddenly showed us pictures of nothing but a wavering light, and then a
total darkness.
"Over-exposed and then
under-exposed," Galbraith said.
The screen had become light
again.
"This is where the inexplicable part
begins," said Galbraith.
The
screen was showing us alternate light and darkness in a rapid succession that
was slowing down like a television picture warming. And there was something in
those pictures if only, straining our eyes in the projection room, we could see
them.
Then the picture steadied. The alterations of
light and dark became slower until, with a last heave, the picture held.
I heard an audible gasp in the projection
room. It was only as I heard it that I realized I had joined in it.
The
picture, at first sight, was not the same scene at all, of the laboratory that
we had seen at the beginning of the experiment. And then, on second sight, it
was too much the same, but in a most fantastic fashion.
We
seemed to be looking outwards from the interior darkness of a cave.
I
can only describe the scene in detail. It was the crucial piece of evidence and
the subject, I suddenly realized, of what everything else, my own presence
there, and that of General Bridger, and Reckman, and the Secretary and the
Senator, was all about.
The
picture, that could only have been actually taken by the camera, was a view
outwards over tumbled rocks and debris. The outer wall of the laboratory, if it
was the laboratory, was gone. The rock-face was open. And outside, beyond the
wreckage, was a glimpse not of the hills around Lake Valley, but of ice-peaks,
high and far away, and jagged mountains.
That was what the first glance showed. The
second showed that there was something all too familiar about the cave. The
rocks and debris in the foreground, though they were dark in the camera
picture, had very much the look of the barrier wall. Jagged scraps glinted among
them that could have been remaining fragments of the mirrors. There were items
visible here and there in the cave that were certainly not rocks and certainly
not natural. They had very much the look of being broken electrical equipment.
But the most important thing was shown almost
clearly in the half-light from the entrance. It was the wrecked control desk,
tilted and turned over, damaged as though something heavy had fallen on it
from above, but none the less there.
And
beside it, all too clearly in that inanimate scene, was a human skeleton.
The
picture did not change. It just remained on the screen before us as the camera
had gone on recording it until, as Galbraith told us, it had run out of film.
For the camera, clock and instruments remained far longer on "the other
side" as it was only possible to call it, than they were actually away
from the laboratory.
But Galbraith did not tell us that. As we all
sat silent in the dark projection room he began to tell us other things.
"It
was a pity that SaTa
Francis saw these pictures
when we first took them," he said quite quietly, speaking to us from the
place he had taken at the end of the first row of the rank of chairs. "We
had no idea, when we first took them, that we were going to get a scene like
this. We had no idea when we took the first dark pictures we were going to get
a skeleton. And we had no idea until we took these last good ones that we were
going to be able to confirm that it was hers."
I felt a sudden impulse of horror. Sitting there, looking at that
screen-picture, and listening to Galbraith, I all but disbelieved it. I thought
of the girl I had just been talking to, not much more than an hour ago, and her
vivid life and youth and enthusiasm as she worked and talked with Strassen. But
Galbraith was inexorable. We could guess that in his mind there was nothing
that could be left to chance.
"We
had to tell her too, you see," he said. "We had to say why we wanted
the X-ray photographs of her, to compare them with the skeleton. She herself
is intelligent. She had to see for herself, to save us from lying as she called
it. She doesn't know quite all of it. She hasn't the medical knowledge to
compare the absence of thickening of those nasal bones in the skull with
herself as she is today. She knows that that can't be a picture of her skeleton
taken when she's very old. But she doesn't know how accurately we can say that
if she is going to become like that, and therefore if this disaster, this
cataclysm is going to happen all around the laboratory, it must be within a
year or two, or probably much, much sooner."
We had been paralyzed, not only I but the
civilians present and perhaps even General Bridger, by the disastrous picture
on the screen and what Galbraith was saying about it. But the Senator got his
breath.
"For
God's sakel" he said. "You have that, you actually have that picture,
taken out of a camera from your synchrotron, and you mean you still have that
girl around here? Get her outl You don't mean you still let her into the laboratory?"
The Senator sounded as though he expected the
synchrotron, the university, and all Lake Valley, to blow up at any moment. I
think we all felt that. It was, after all, a camera picture. And the skeleton,
if it had been proved to be Sara Francis, and a young Sara Francis, was
damning. It was a threat, something more than a threat, that was beyond all
believing.
"Wait!" Galbraith said. "I called you here to this conferonce
on the assumption that we had to act. But do what? This is a scientific
phenomenon and we can only approach it scientifically. We can only aim to find
out more. And we have found out a little more already."
"Find
out, hell!" the Senator roared. "Get everyone out! Close down that
synchrotron! And clear the area!"
Galbraith
went on, not the voice of sweet reason exactly, hut deliberately, doggedly and
obstinately. He went on just ns though the Senator had not spoken.
"You
see the first question is whether this is the future," lie said.
"It's hard to see how we can find that out, the status and nature of the
observation, and whether or not it is some kind of illusion, unless we send a
man. But suppose it is the future. As a hypothesis we have supposed it. A few
things follow. That control desk in the picture is fairly clear. It's possible
to work on the basis of the visible tarnish of the metal parts and other
things. You might say that if it is the future then this picture was taken, if
"was" is the word, about a hundred years ahead from now."
"You're mad,
Professor," said Secretary Stephens softly.
"Not
mad," said Galbraith, concluding in the darkened room. "Just doing
what I always have done, which is to apply my intelligence to what we have.
This picture is taken a hundred years from now. The disaster it records, on the
face of it, is going to happen within the next few months. And it isn't local.
Just look at that mountain chain outside the cave. But it won't happen today,
tomorrow. That skeleton coincides with X-ray pictures of Sara Francis quite
exactly except in one particular. If you look carefully at the slightly shadowy
picture of the lower jaw, you'll see there is just one tooth missing. Not
broken. Dentistry. A clear and neat extraction. But in life today, Sara
Francis still has that tooth. She's safe, I think. We're all safe, just until
she has a toothache. But when she feels she has to have that tooth out, then
everything shown in this picture, we can only assume, is due to happen at any
minute. That will be the time to take precautions. But as for closing the
synchrotron down, Senator,
I think on the contrary we will have to use
it to its maximum extent, and find out what we can, and act before then."
He
concluded on a deliberate and almost savage note of logic.
n
I had stood stunned in the familiar office. Through the
window I could see the hangar, the building with the centrifuge machine, and
the distant sight of the rocket pads. It was the office in which they told us
the results when we had been through one of those physical or mental
stress-sessions in the course of which they had more means of instilling
terror, we said, than had ever been known to man.
It
was in that office too that they told those of us who had failed, when their
hopes and ambitions were suddenly at an end and they were out. But I had not
expected that to happen to me.
"What did I do?" I said. I was
trying to understand it. "How do I know there's not been some mistake?
Where did I fail? In what? If it was that acceleration test last night . .
."
The
Colonel looked at me steadily across his desk. He was accustomed to dealing
with men in a state of emotion without feeling it himself.
"I have a right to
know!" I said.
"You did not
fail," he said.
I stood there dumbly. To me it seemed that
there was treachery in the world around me.
"You have been
appointed to other work," he said.
I
did not believe he could do it. He could, of course. A man does not sign on to
become an astronaut and fly among the stars. He signs on to do what he is told
and to go to where he is sent. But I was one of the few who had set my faith in
this. I had believed in it, aimed for it, from the beginning. And I had thought
I was getting there.
"I
wish to resign my commission," I said. "I will leave the
service."
"You will think about
that again," he said.
"It
should be understood," I said. "A man endures so much. If he does not
fail, he has a right to know that his attainment, his sacrifice, depends only
on himself."
"Do
you want me to tell you about your new work?" he said.
"No."
He
gave me a sealed envelope. "It's in there," he said. "As much as
can be told to you about it before you actually get there. That's all, Major
Judgen."
He dismissed me. As I
turned to go, he said,
"I'm sorry,
Howard."
I
went on out. He could be sorry. He would sit at that desk for ever and a day
sending other men into space, but at least he had that much connection with the
rocket program, while I was out.
I
packed quickly. We always did that. When one of us was dropped from the flight
program he packed and got out quickly while the others were still at work. He
just disappeared. It was better than meeting to say good-bye. There was too
much feeling on either side, and it happened far too often.
It was like cutting off a
limb.
I
was in the car before I knew what I was doing. I was in it and rolling down the
highway before I realized that I did not know where I was going. I had no home
to go to. I was one of the few men who were unmarried, and that, I guessed,
must have counted against me both ways, both because they preferred the
stability of married men and because I had no dependents or others to suffer
at my change of location and change of job. But that was later thought. Just
then I was driving up the highway and it came to me as an academic thought that
I might be driving in the wrong direction.
I pulled in to the side of the highway and
opened the envelope I had been given. Report to:
Prof.
T. Galbraith,
Nucleonics
Faculty,
Proton-synchrotron
Laboratory,
Lake Valley University,
Lake Valley, Tennessee,
the instructions read. I opened the flap of the envelope again and
tipped it, waiting for whatever else would come out in the shape of travel
orders, time-schedules, ancillary instructions, or explanations. There was
nothing. I squeezed the envelope open and looked in it.
I was on my own. I was not even told how,
when, or by what route, I should arrive. They could leave it, naturally, to a
man in my position. They may even have thought, 'He has a car. He will have his
limited serviceman's belongings in the car. It will be easier for him to drive
there.' But they did not usually do that. They had ways of studying the
individual, but they were not those ways. When I was posted to Canaveral, I was
ordered to fly there, and it was left to me to collect my car the next time I
had time available in the shape of leave, or to have it sent on as freight.
With some of us, in our service, they had cultivated an almost deliberate
blindness.
To
hell, I thought. I could go on a blind. I could disappear for a week or two.
After being tensed up for so long, it was a big temptation.
Instead,
I started the car and drove on to the nearest town. I found a hotel and used
their hall. I had them put through a person-to-person call to Professor T.
Galbraith and tell me when they got him. I sat waiting in the lounge. I was
going nowhere. Maybe the 'they' who ran my life, having selected me for one
job, knew exactly what I would do.
"Professor T. Galbraith?" I said to
the phone. "This is a
Major Howard Judgen. I've been told to report
to you. Just when exacdy do you want me?"
The voice at the other end took me in its
stride. He might have been arranging delivery for a refrigerator or a cooker.
"Tomorrow, Major? Can
you make it at least by Thursday?"
He
spoke of me as about some item of equipment that he would be needing shortly
and intended soon to use.
"So soon?" I
said.
"I don't mind, Major." He seemed
surprised. "But don't you think you'd better look at it before you risk
your neck for us?"
in
We were
standing in an illuminated rock tunnel, deep-licwn in
the cliff-face below the hillside. We were far back from what I understood to
be the business end of the proton-synchrotron, at what they called the
start-end of the linear nccelerator, in air-conditioned chambers underground,
when the red-headed young man called William Strassen put his hand on my arm.
"This
is almost the classic case of scientific discovery, Judgen. You have to know
what is involved to understand it. You have to know of what his greatness consists.
In Gal-hraifh's case it was a question of his position, as chief and mentor of
all of us here, and his status as a scientist. He was endowed with a research
tool costing a hundred million of (he Government's money. But that was not
enough. That was a beginning. The time came when the research tool, all this
that you see here, these excavations, the synchrotron, the hydro-electric
generators producing power enough to feed a major
town, and all to his design, just did not function. You see? A lesser man would
have acted in a state of panic. He would have said, with so much money already
spent, and so much expected of us, let's do something, anything, to make it
work. But not Galbraith. He stood in the big, shielded underground laboratory
that you'll see down there. He said "So this is new. There is some
principle here that we do not fully understand. Keep everything as it is and
launch a program. The interesting thing is just why it does not work."
I had arrived at Lake Valley the night
before, driving up the winding valley road and seeing the university buildings
tinted pink in the evening sunlight on the hillside. I had not known what it
was at the head of the valley and had had no idea it was connected with the
university. I had thought it was a power station with the big conduits bringing
down water for the hydro-electric power, and that the rest had something to do
with industry. I did not know a research tool could be so big. I had no
acquaintance with a proton-synchrotron.
Strassen
was Galbraith's chief research assistant. And Sara Francis, hovering around him
in her long white coat, looked at him earnestly.
"Tell
him," she said. "Tell him what it meant to a man of Galbraith's reputation that a hundred-million-dollar research
tool that he had designed, and for which atomic scientists throughout the world
were waiting, was standing idle. Tell him how they said he was incompetent and
should never have been given the project in the first place, and how Galbraith
stood firm and said, "There is a basic scientific principle here, and
something far more fundamental to be discovered with all this machinery failing
to do what it is designed and supposed to do, than we could ever hope to
discover if it were working and firing its particles at target atoms and performing
such little tricks as turning lead to gold.' "
I
looked at what they called the proton feeder source in the hewn rock tunnel,
and at the great array of conduits and sectioned tubes and cables that led away
in straight-line diminished distance towards the proton-synchrotron housing at
the far end. I said, "Just how?"
They
wore puzzled expressions, turning to look at me nlmost suspiciously, unable to
believe that I could be so stupid, so I told them, "Galbraith tried to
tell me after the man who met me here took me to him last night. He was too
(idvanced for me. As soon as he began to talk about this I could not understand
him."
They
looked dubious and led me to the proton feeder source, which I understood was
designed to create a rarified ion cloud at the end of the long white tube that
ran the length of the tunnel in a sequence of jointed sections.
"You
know what a proton is?" Sara Francis said impatiently. She treated me at
high school level for a moment. "The nucleus of a hydrogen atom?"
Then she looked at me inquisitively, smiled momentarily and turned her
impatience on herself: "We use protons as the fundamental particle, as the
missile of our research tool. In effect this is a gun to shoot them
forwards."
William
Strassen put his hand on my arm again and began to lead me down the tunnel
towards the synchrotron.
"We
are following the route the protons travel." He showed me section after
section of the tube. "These forces are all exerted on their tiny object.
The protons are attracted forwards by a charge that passes just ahead of them
like the curl of a breaking wave. They fall. They fall through an
electro-static field that has the power of a hundred million volts. Each
section of this tube is an accelerator in itself."
"A hundred million volts exerted on the
proton's tiny mass," Sara Francis said, "gives an answer that begins
to approach the speed of light."
Ahead, the tube passed through a barrier that
hid its destination. We went round the barrier by steps and a passageway in
the rock. We came out into a chamber or curving tunnel. To right and left the
ends bent away and it was obvious that, deep underground, they would meet to
form a perfeet circle. It was not a tunnel in effect, but a great hall with
something massive in the centre.
The
proton tube entered through the barrier and ran into a metallic housing that
curved around the centre.
"This
is where the power goes," Strassen said. "The power to run a town.
It's not exaggerating to say that this is the world's most powerful magnetic
core." He indicated the massive center with its coils and windings.
"Our proton is like a flying electric current. We guide it in its path by
magnetic forces."
"There
is a limit to electrical insulation," Sara Francis said. "There is a
limit to what can be achieved by a linear accelerator in a straight drop. But
here the protons are circling in a spiral. We give them an impulse each time
they come round and make them move faster still."
They
were enthusiasts. They must have worked on that synchrotron from the beginning
and they showed it to me as though it was their baby. I saw objections in my
ignorance. To them it was a passion.
"I
thought you said your protons were already travelling at near the speed of
light. If I remember anything of Einstein at all, he says that that is the
ultimate, that nothing could ever travel faster. Or if it did, in some fashion
I can't explain, its transit would be instantaneous and it would be everywhere
at once."
They
looked at me suddenly as though I had cheated them in some way, standing in the
echoing hall within the rock.
"Other
people do it," said William Strassen sharply. "The European
proton-synchrotron at Geneva has a final output of twenty-five thousand-million
volts!"
"And
yours?" I said. "What's yours—all this—designed to do?"
"Two point five million million
volts!" "There is a difference?"
"Just
a hundred times as much," Sara Francis said as though that were nothing,
but confronting me no longer as though I were a child.
"Theirs works, yours doesn't?" I
said. I looked around at llie great rock dome and massive windings. I believed
I could see why there was a limit to the size of these things, even if they
couldn't. And I was prejudiced by what I had already heard. They had built all
this, and instead of the hardest atom-smashing rays ever, nothing, just
nothing, came out at I lie end.
"You've got this wrong, Judgen," Strassen
told me seriously. "It isn't that we reach a limit at the speed of light,
which is what you're thinking. Physical particles can never reach the speed of
light. They begin to gather size and mass. The Russians are already using these
more massive particles to hombard their targets in a point five million-million
synchro-lion at Novorosisk."
He
had calmed and become firm and clear. For a young man he was strangely,
mentally, formidable. I realized he knew what he was talking about if ever
anyone did.
And
as for me, it was true what the girl had thought. I was no more than a visitor
in their great rock halls. In iheir particular subject I was a child in arms.
They
took me on to their laboratory. It was, as they said, the business end, in a
great rock chamber. The protons should have come out there, flying out through
a slit tangentially, and the laboratory was divided into two halves, a safe
area behind a barrier wall, and an unsafe area filled with robot machinery
around the target, that we could only view through mirrors. In the safe area
where we stood was n control desk from which, I learned, Sara Francis controlled the operation of the synchrotron, while
the effect of highspeed protons on the target was watched and recorded through
instruments of fantastic delicacy, in theory, by Strassen and Galbraith or
whoever might be the other operators allowed the use of the machine when once
they got it going.
"So
what is the answer?" I asked Strassen while I looked around the spaces of
the laboratory where students were working on apparatus and where one side was
mirrors that showed us the "hot" area, which was even deeper in the
rock. "What is the cause of your trouble, since Galbraith told me that
when you're working the synchrotron near its maximum, and you should be
getting a beam of particles striking that target behind the wall there, you get
nothing out at all?"
"Not nothing,"
said Sara Francis.
Strassen looked at me
strangely.
"The insulation breaks
down," he said.
"You mean you get a
spark?"
He looked at a student who was working near,
us, then moved me away from him. It was a deliberate gesture. He fook me to a
little table, and we bent over it, looking at some scraps of metal that had
been removed from round the target and that were looking strangely aged, and
crystaline and powdery around the edges.
"The
time insulation," he said. "What else? We're working very near the
edge of things. Who knows what happens when a solid particle is speeded up ever
nearer to the speed of light and begins to increase in size and mass?"
It was Sara Francis who
told me quietly.
"We know, we believe, that we get an
effect in time," she said. Across the table with its exhibits she looked
at me steadily with her intelligent, frank gray eyes. "We did not know at
first. We tried to record the passage of the protons, or some kind of
radiation, on photographic plates. The proton beam should have punched holes
right through them. Instead, we had to put in a camera to get anything at all.
And then, instead of a record of the halo we thought that we were seeing, we
got strange pictures."
I
looked back at the mirrors as though I might see something there in the
inhuman, forbidden area beyond the wall.
"Pictures?"
"What do we know," said Strassen,
"about these strange regions where particles are approaching the speed of light? Each bigger synchrotron that is built brings solid matter nearer
to a state that is unattainable and impossible. You know that, Judgen? If a
particle did travel at the speed of light it would transit instantaneously. It
would be in two places simultaneously and everywhere at once. It's size and
mass would then be infinite so it would be everywhere before it even started.
Something must break down before then. There is always something that happens
before you (ouch infinity. But there are only a limited number of parameters
in a field equation, and the one that cracks is time."
IV
General
Bridger was convinced by the time the lights came on.
"Come,"
he said to myself and Reckman. He took us out to sit in his car.
We went out of the building and got into it.
The General took the wheel himself. He dismissed his man. But he did not turn
the engine or shift the ignition switch. We just sat there, I beside him in the
front seat and Reckman in the back.
When the General did not say anything, but
sat there as though he were driving at high speed to nowhere, Reckman began to
talk methodically, not saying anything it seemed, but going over the points we
already knew.
"We
know it's impossible," he said in his flat voice. "In the laboratory
they ended the experiment at half past twelve. In the view taken from the
camera in the bell-jar, the laboratory clock was showing twenty of three by the
time we lost it. By then, the bell-jar and its contents had been sent, had
taken all those pictures and come back. The experiment had been dismantled. The
camera had been taken out of the bell-jar and the film taken from the camera.
Yet the record was taken of a time when the camera was not there. All right.
There was consistence. The clock and the recording instruments when they
recovered them showed an elapsed time of eight hours ten minutes. There is a
logic within a logic. The pictures may be genuine. Or the Professor may be
giving us a line of hocus-pocus."
The General sat for a while
in the car, then turned to me.
"What's your impression, Judgen? You're
new and fresh to this. The Professor's synchrotron won't work. So he produces
all these pictures. Do you think he's bluffing?"
He
meant me to think before I answered, and so I did that.
"You've found a motive, sir," I
said, looking straight ahead. "If the synchrotron was out of action for
some design-fault reason, he could be tempted to make up something to clear his
name. There is that. But I don't see him doing it. I've seen him, I've listened
to him. To my mind he's the kind of man who, if there was anything about his
equipment he did not know, he'd call someone else in even if it was the nearest
plumber. He'd only be interested in finding out. He'd think about his name
afterwards. And then there are the other facts that make his position
unimpeachable and quite certain."
"What facts?" the
General said.
"Sara Francis and
William Strassen," I said.
"They're in the
plot?" said Reckman.
"Not in a million years and ten thousand
cataclysms and.disasters," I said.
The
General went on sitting there. I wondered what he thought of me.
Reckman
after all had his job to do. It was his business to be suspicious. It was that
kind of job. I never wanted it.
"There
have been famous scientific frauds," he said. "Like the case of the
Piltdown Man."
Bridger turned to him and
said: "Drop it, Reckman."
So
we began to think again. I did. The General had apparently finished thinking.
He began talking to me.
"You
know the competition is keen for the space-ride, Major. You might just go back
there someday. You aren't dismissed from that work. It was just that we needed
someone. You were riding fairly high. You might have got a flight in a time or
two. But your whole background is taken into consideration, for instance
whether you volunteer for things or not. But this isn't like that."
"Sir," I said.
"What I mean is that you don't have to
volunteer," he said.
I
thought about it. It was hard to believe in that range of mountains that had
shown in the photographs. They had looked unreal, like the Himalayas. I found
my thoughts turning to Sara Francis. She was real. I wondered about William
Strassen and whether he was married, and just what it meant to two people to
work together on a thing like that, and what a stranger could do to cut him
out.
"I volunteer," I
said.
General Bridger grunted. Later, when I knew
him better, I found he did that in a bar when anyone put a glass before him, or
at meals when anyone put food on his plate.
"Congratulations,"
said Reckman dryly.
"Let's
go," the General said. He began to drive the car down in the direction of
the laboratory and the synchrotron.
"It
could be an atomic war," he said on the way. "The question is if even
an atomic war is big enough to create the situation that is visible in the
cave. Or it could be a local disaster. If it's a local disaster, the Senator's
right. We'll have to clear the area. But if it's an atomic war the question is
who hit us. With this instrument we may get advance warning. We can do more
than that. We can get our own blow in first."
I
turned round in the seat and Reckman looked at me uneasily. I looked back at
him. We both felt there was some doubt about the General's analysis, but we
did- not know what. We did not speak.
Down
at the synchrotron we called for Strassen and Sara Francis. They met us,
Strassen coming forward. It seemed he had heard of the General and his
connection with the affair, but not actually met him. I performed the
introductions.
"We
have decided to send a man," the General said. It was not strictly true.
Galbraith and the Senator and the
Secretary
were still arguing about it, and all they could be arguing about was a
recommendation that would have to go elsewhere. But the General had decided and
Strassen seemed to accept that. He nodded.
"Just
how can we send a man?" the General said. "What do you need? What
help can we give you? It may take time for agreement to come through, but we
can get everything prepared and ready. We can begin now, and then, when the
word comes, we can go."
I
thought Strassen might make objections to the pushing, aggressive service way.
I knew that handling the synchrotron was not like loading a gun and pulling the
trigger and firing it. But he took it well and told the General
"Cornel" and led us into the workings.
They
had a small work room with apparatus-assembly benches adjacent to the
laboratory, and he took us to that. There was just room for us amid the various
items of apparatus and instruments in process of construction but Strassen
took us to the main bench where an intricate and beautiful machine was being
made and already half finished.
Its
basis was a large transparent sphere of hard plastic, about four-feet-six in
diameter but at present, open on the bench and divided into two halves. Mounted
in the lower half already was a mass of intricate apparatus, a battery power
pack and a series of electric eyes and instruments all mounted on a metal
sub-frame. But already in pride of place in the completed framework was a
complicated camera with a turret of different lenses and machinery to change
them and tilt and pan the camera and alter aperture and focus.
"What is it?" the
General said.
"Our
robot observer," Strassen said. "Able to illuminate and focus on
every detail of the cave. More than that. Able to turn an astronomical
telescope lens on the night sky outside the cave and take records that will
tell us exactly when the pictures are being taken: the date and season of the
year while registering climatic and every other kind of data. This plastic
sphere itself," he tapped its hard and glass-like surface, "is
designed to take advantage of the maximum voltime of material the synchrotron
can handle. If you insist on sending a man, then all you have to do is take all
the machinery out and put in a seat or whatever else you think you need to make
a human observer comfortable."
His
voice was cold and he was looking at the General. His attitude was restrained
and remote, I thought, and distinctly lacking in that enthusiasm of which I
knew him capable. The General saw it too.
"You say if we insist on sending a man?" he said.
"Your
man isn't going to take observations as accurately ns this machine," said Strassen.
"A man can get out of the sphere and
climb over the rocks and see what's outside the cave!" the General said.
"What for?" said Strassen.
We
were all standing crowded before the bench and we had been examining the
machine, but now we were looking at the two of them and they were the only ones
who were talking.
It was a conflict of temperament largely, I
realized, between Strassen whose approach was scientific, who wanted
observations mostly, and to whom they were most real, most valid and useful,
when they consisted of accurate photographs and graphs on paper, and the
General who wanted action. But it was something more than that.
"Dammit,
man, this isn't just an academic scientific experiment! It isn't detailed
photographs of the cave we want, but to know whether it is really there or not,
and if so if lliat damned new mountain chain is there outside it or if it's an
illusion! If it's true, we've got to know that as soon as possible and see
what we can do about it!"
"That's
what I mean," said Strassen. "You can't do anything."
The
General stared as though Strassen were some raw recruit who had not yet been
taught that the army did not know the meaning of impossible.
"As
you say," Strassen said, "you want to know whether the cave of which
we have pictures is true or not. You mean you want to know whether it is the
future or not. But if it isn't the future, you don't need to bother. You don't
need to do anything about it because in that case it isn't so. But if it is the
future, you can't do anything about it. The fact that you could alter it in any
way would prove it was not the future."
"Metaphysics!" the General said.
"Not
so," said Strassen. "Just logic. If these pictures we've got, of a
disaster in our laboratory that has become a cave, do represent the future,
then so far as they are concerned whatever we are doing now has already
happened. They mean that the future is there; it's fixed, it's final, emerging
out of some causation that took place in our present and its past. The future
must be like that if the scientific presumption that every event must have a
material cause is true. The theory of causation implies determinism. It means
that whatever you do now, no matter what you do, must contribute to the future
as it's going to be. No matter what you do now, your actions must be part and
parcel of the creation of that future. It must be so or there would be no logic
and no science. We would have events happening in the present that were not
caused and had no connection with anything in the past. The answer would be
chaos."
Strassen
had paled slightly. He did not find it easy to stand up to the General. But his
dictum was staggering in its implications. It was as staggering as the youthful
assumption of intellectual superiority with which he put it to the General.
Yet Reckman saw his point. It was the thing he and I had been doubtful about
when the General had been talking of using the synchrotron as a kind of advance-warning
air-raid alert system, when we were arriving in the car. He came in quickly:
"You mean if the synchrotron were
capable of showing us pictures of a catastrophe as a warning, and we were
capable of averting the catastrophe, then the synchrotron wouldn't be showing
us pictures of a catastrophe in the first place?"
"Exactly,"
Strassen said with the chilly, daunting smile of the man of intellect
confronted by the men of action. "I
I old you: the past causes the present, the
present causes the future. That is the basic, fundamental assumption of
science. It is determinism, maybe. But the only difficulty about prediction,
as anyv scientist
will tell you, is just that we don't know enough. That's why we study. But
that's what we should do about this, and all we can do about this. Study it!
See what we can leam from it! And with all due respect, it's only a General who
would think of taking short cuts!"
I watched General Bridger. I was alarmed. I
knew that n General, by the time he had risen to the rank and seniority of
Bridger, must have some experience of dealing with civilians. But with top
civilians and the higher politicians, and llien not without, as history showed,
a considerable degree of friction. But for him to be confronted by a civilian
of Slrassen's youth and lack of status, and to be taunted with nn assumption of
intellectual superiority in just that way, might produce an explosion, I
thought, at any moment.
Bridger behaved well. At least he kept the
remnants of his dignity. If he went red it was no more than could be expected.
"Strassen," he said, "You're under orders! You aren't in charge
here. Fortunately, that's Galbraith. But if you were, you'd learn some
elementary facts. You'd learn that when I say we send a man, then we send a
man!"
"I
didn't say we wouldn't, did I?" Strassen said. "So far as I remember
the reason we came in here was because you wanted me to show you how to do it
in the first place."
The
event was smoothed over in that way and we went on to talk about whether I
should be fitted with a space-suit and oxygen cylinders and other equipment,
and if so how we would fit them in the sphere. But Reckman and I had a word
about it when we found ourselves together as we came out.
"The
young man had a point," he said, looking at me curiously as we went
towards the cars. "Suppose this is the future, this place you're going,
and the General succeeds in altering it on the basis of your report when you
come back, Just where exactly, and what should we call it, the place where you
have been?"
"I know," I said. "I don't
like it. If I go there, and then come back, and then we alter it, it won't only
be that the place and situation where I've been won't exist any more. We will
have created events that will imply that not only does it not exist but it
never will exist and has never been. But the General's right, you know. He's
had more experience of human limitations, especially of knowledge, then
Strassen. The only thing to do is try it."
V
In
what little time
I had left to me before I went, I did my utmost to get to know Sara Francis.
I
suppose it was natural I should feel for her. Everyone did. Hers was a
situation no girl, no human being, had ever met before. It was not merely that
there was in existence a photograph of what purported or appeared to be her
skeleton after death. That was taken, so far as any of us could guess, at a
period of a hundred years on, and almost all of us then living would be
skeletons by then. It was more the particular circumstances of the photograph,
the fact that it was the skeleton of Sara as a young woman, and not Sara old.
and all the surrounding detail, the disaster in the working laboratory of the
synchrotron, the wrecked control desk, and all the other evidences of some vast
and near disaster in the place where she went on working. It was true there was
the singular item, the saving detail of the tooth, on which Galbraith placed
his confidence, insisting on its abolute validity, but it was an incredible
situation to be hanging over anyone, and I was surprised, even shocked and a
little awed, that she bore up so well.
I went walking with her in the evening along
the pathways the students had made that led along the valley sides and into
the woods. We had been busy all day with the preparations, but when I asked her
what she was doing in (lie evening, she was free. I was wrong about her and
Stras-son. They worked together, but even before she met him lie had been
happily married.
"Why don't you go away?" I asked
her. "It's hard to see how it could happen, the situation in the wrecked
laboratory, If you just went to live somewhere else, a
hundred or a thousand miles away, and never came near this place again. I don't
think anyone would blame you. I don't see how they could. And despite
Galbra'ith, it might even be the most sensible thing, as a precaution, for all
of us."
We
were walking along the path at that time towards the woods, and she glanced at
me.
"Do you think I should
do that? Do you want me to?"
"No,"
I said. "I'd like to say yes. My feelings tell me to say yes. But while
you still have that tooth, I think Galbraith's liRht. I don't see how you can
get round that fact. I'm being selfish."
She
grinned at me cooly in inquiry, teasing me a little, wondering which way to
take it.
It was true that one of the reasons Galbraith
wanted to keep her there if we were to send a man was that it would be safer
for me. It was not easy to understand what was happening with the synchrotron,
and there were numbers of unknowns. No one knew exactly why, for example, the
transfer was always to the cave at what appeared to be about the same time.
They had tried it often enough, and got the same results, but with a new
operator, who might unknowingly sot up a slightly different field, no one knew
what would happen. But that was not what I had meant when I said it, and she
guessed it.
"So you want me to stay in preference to
going to live n thousand miles away?"
"A thousand miles is a
long way to go visiting," I said.
Her smile was still cool
and challenging, almost a grin.
"And
it might not be worth it, anyway," she said, "if I was the kind of girl who would want to cut up
and run at the first sign of trouble instead of staying as long as possible to
see what I could do about it."
I
looked at the tops of the trees ahead, which were gilded in the evening light
while the sun made long slanting shadows below them.
"Is
that what you feel about it?" I asked her. "That you want to stay as
long as possible and fight back—as long as you have that tooth?"
"It's
a perfectly good tooth," she said with some indignation. "I never
even had a toothache." Then she answered my question. She had that kind of
mind. To her, questions were neither all gallant nor rhetorical. "I talked
about it to Stras-sen too," she said. "I'm not in love with him, but
I am influenced by him."
"What did he
say?"
"Can't
you guess? He said either this thing is a prediction, or it isn't. If it is a
genuine prediction, no matter how, then it is absolute and final. We can't do
anything about it, no matter how we try. But if it isn't a prediction, if we
admit that anything we can do can change it, then it simply isn't a genuine
picture of the future, and therefore there is nothing to worry about. Either
way—he found it hard to say this, but he's a very honest man, Strassen—it was
no good my attempting to run away."
I
walked with her, feeling her companionship and wanting it, but at the same time
thinking of Strassen's reasoning.
"That's a very masculine way of
thinking," I said. "That kind of hard 'either, or' logic. It isn't
the land of thing that would normally appeal to a woman."
"People
who don't believe in logic don't work with big and dangerous machines like a
synchrotron," she said simply.
I
got it then. It was the kind of revelation that comes sometimes in a lifetime.
It isn't easy to explain. I had been proud, I suppose, without knowing it, in
my work at the rocket base. Staking our lives on logic was our strength. We
dealt with unimaginable forces. We faced heat, explosion, the vacuum and cold
of space. We guarded against all contingencies, and because we were as near
perfect as it was humanly possible to be, we got it right. We lived. Or if we
failed, we died.
Now
I realized that a girl in a laboratory could take as many risks, could
calculate even more insidious forces than those we dealt with more precisely,
and in short had my own brand of courage with far less show.
"All
right," I said. "But in this case even if it were a prediction, I'm
with the General. I think we can do something about it. Suppose this is a
prediction. Suppose it's an actual picture of the future. The very fact that we
have seen it changes things. We see it, therefore you go away. Some other
events may happen, but not exactly that situation in the cave. The future has
to alterl We make it so."
She
walked with me a little way. We entered the woods nnd we stopped there in the
cool lengthening shadows of the golden evening. She leant against a tree.
"Do you think so, Howard?" she
said. "Do you think I haven't thought of that? Suppose I did go away.
Suppose we trained a new operator and you used him or her when you made your
attempt at a human transit. It's tricky, this thing that's happening with the
synchroton. There are some mistakes an operator could make that would result
in you getting not a time effect but a proton beam. You could be killed. Hut
there are worse mistakes than that. Suppose instead of putting you down in the
cave, in the wrecked laboratory, which is the one point in the future with
which we have established certain contact, they dropped you in space somewhere,
or they got you out there and could not get you back!"
I
said nothing. There were dangers, we all knew, but no one had put them to me
quite so clearly and bluntly as she was
doing then. I wondered why.
But
she stood looking at me with clear, frank look in her gray eyes.
"That's the trouble about prediction,
Howard!" she said. "If it is a prediction, if it's a true prediction,
it will be bound to happen. Don't you see? Do you think I haven't thought of
it? This new operator they would have to use if I went away: he could so easily
get into trouble and get you away but not be able to bring you back. And then
what would happen? What could they do but send for me? And what could I do but
come back, if I heard they were in trouble? It would be like a nightmare. I
don't like nightmare situations. I would come back and take over an experiment
that was already in difficulties, a situation that was out of control! Who
knows what would happen then? It would be something—it would have the
inevitability of an old Greek tragedy! A situation already out of control and getting
more out of control. No! I prefer to handle it from the start in a way that I
know that I can!"
We
were close together and alone in the woods. She looked fragile but determined,
with a power of mind and spirit I had not seen before in any woman.
"There's
one thing about that," I said. "If you went away, you'd have to make
up your mind not to come back. Not to come back whatever happened."
She looked away from me.
"I
can't do that, Howard. You are doing this for me, aren't you?"
I put out my hand onto her arm and I saw her
move as I touched her. She looked up at me quickly, almost afraid. We looked
into one another's eyes for a moment and recognized what we saw there.
"After
this is over," I said. "Sometime—when we both can go away." Our
eyes met and held for a moment.
VI
The
experiment was
timed for noon. They always had timed the experiments for noon. It was a matter
of avoiding any confusion about the clocks.
I
stood there in the safe half of the laboratory. The place was almost crowded
since the General and Reckman were present as well as Galbraith and Sara and Strassen.
I was wearing a standard high-altitude flying suit, and General Bridger watched
me as I adjusted the belts and flaps. He had decided to be present for the
experiment himself, and it was a measure of the importance he attached to it.
"Are
you ready for him to go, Strassen?" he said. He looked at Strassen, who
was handling the target-area instruments and the handling machinery, as though
he were some kind of young subordinate and assistant who was not wholly lo be
trusted.
I did not share his view. Strassen was
against the man experiment, but once it had been accepted he had thrown himself
wholly into it. He was completely engaged in the readings he was taking and the
work that he was doing, and lie answered
the General shortly: "Hold yet!" In fact there was no one in whose
hands I would rather be than Stras-son's, except maybe Sara's.
I looked at Sara. She looked a little pale
but was wholly absorbed in her work at the control desk. There were times, in
"bringing up" the synchrotron, when it functioned normally us a
synchrotron and they got the proton beam. They had lo be sure they were past
those points and that they had something perfectly stable, in terms of the
field and phase-relationships, before I couid be allowed to enter the danger
urea.
Galbraith watched the two
of them. I was afraid that they might have been thrown off by the presence of
General Bridger and Reckman, as well as their usual assistants who were in the
background; but Galbraith, Sara and Strassen had a professional's degree of
concentration. Not even Bridgets assumption that he was in command upset them.
The laboratory clock on the wall stood at
four minutes to the hour. There was an odd remark.
Galbraith looked at me briefly. "Pity
you couldn't go combat-armed," he said. He glanced at the clock and then
at Sara and Strassen as though he could tell just how far they had got by their
attitudes and the expression on their faces. "Give him his final instructions,
General."
"You will go and take the observations
as you have been instructed. You will emerge and photograph the area immediately
around the cave," the General said. "You will then get into the
capsule to come back. We will take no chances this time." He looked at
Galbraith. "What's this about going combat-armed?" he said.
Galbraith
himself had warned us that I was not to try to carry any weapons. It was
something due to the eddy-currents set up in any metal objects around the
synchrotron by the magnetic fields set up by the massive magnetic core.
Fire-arms were out, yet now he was regretting it. He had spent the previous
night examining the films and still pictures again and I wondered what he had
seen in them that none of us had seen before.
"Go,"
said Strassen. "I am ready now to go." His tense voice cut across us.
The General, Galbraith and I were still
engaged in the last minute conversation. Galbraith shook his head. "It
isn't very likely," he said. "Judgen, take a look around this laboratory
and imprint on your mind everything that is here." But he turned away from
us then. He glanced at Strassen. "Go," he said. "You're holding
now." He turned to Sara, not speaking to her loudly. "Strassen says
go," he said and waited.
"The
field is steady now," Sara said without looking up from her infinite
concentration on the instruments on her control desk. "If it holds another
thirty seconds, then you can go."
Galbraith
looked up at the laboratory clock, but he pulled out his watch as well.
"Good luck,
Howard," Reckman said.
"If
he obeys his instructions hell be all right," General Bridger said.
"Go,"
Sara said in a quiet voice that was firm except for the slightest trace of a
catch in it. "Good luck, Howard." She must have been carrying that
last phrase, determined to say it, all through her concentration.
"Strassen?" said
Galbraith,
"Go," said
Strussen.
"Now," Galbraith
said to me. "Go now!"
The laboratory clock said
two minutes to.
We
had rehearsed the next step. I looked at the barrier wall and the view we had
across it through the mirrors. The plastic sphere or capsule was standing in
the "hot" half of the laboratory with the lower half of it, in which
a seat had been fixed, established firmly on a plinth. The upper half was held
above it and nearby in the "hands" of some of the complex machinery
that Strassen operated. There was a ladder up our side of the barrier wall. I
went to it and ran up it.
The
aim was to keep me in the "hot" side of the laboratory, where no one
would normally go at all, for as short a time as possible. I got to the top of
the wall and saw the machinery, the plinth, the sphere directly, no longer
viewing them through the mirrors. I must have been receiving some slight stray
radiation at that point despite all Sara's and Strassen's care, but a bridge
had been established from the top of the wall by the ladder to the lip of the
sphere. It would have been possible for me to go round the wall and then climb
up into the sphere, but that, it had been decided, would have taken longer. I
ran across the bridge in fact and got at once into the lower half of the
sphere, which had been lead-lined. I was getting far less radiation then. It
had been estimated that it would not harm me at all if the period I was in it
was of the order of a minute.
Behind
me, I could hear Galbraith, who was looking at his watch, begin to count:
"One, two, three, four ..."
I looked back at the safe side of the
laboratory and realized that I could see all of them, Galbraith, Strassen, Sara,
the General and Reckman, in the mirrors. Only the clock on the laboratory wall
above them could be viewed directly. I wondered what was going to happen. I
cannot pretend that I was not afraid. I would have sat in the nose cone of a
rocket in comparative certainty and comfort. This was new. "Goodbye,
Sara!" I called. I told the rest: "O.K.!"
In
fact the machinery around me, in the target area of the synchrotron, was
already moving. The top of the sphere too had been lined with an internal
framework on which slid lead-lined slides or curtains and it was essential to
get it down on me, and have me enclosed from the radiation as soon as possible.
Strassen had not waited for my signal. His handling machinery, controlled by
the wheels and grips below the barrier wall, was swinging into action. I had
not time to think then.
An
arm swung over me handing me oxygen cylinders. No vacuum had been encountered
by instruments in the course of the transfer, but pressure variations had been
registered, and when a cage of mice had been sent they had come back suffering
apparently from slight asphyxia. The General was taking no chances. He had
ordered oxygen and a suit that, if necessary, could be pressurized. I had to
stow and clip on the cylinders and adjust my face-mask and plug myself in. Then
my roof, the upper half of the sphere, was coming down over me.
Working
in face-mask and goggles now, I steadied it with my hands and eased it into
position, making sure that the two halves mated. It enclosed me in darkness
since the interior shields were drawn. I drew one back and looked out and put
my hand to the aperture and made the thumbs-up sign. I could see them watching
me from a distance through the mirrors. The laboratory clock said one minute
short of twelve. Galbraith held up both hands to me. It was the signal for me
to re-draw the shutter. I was enclosed inside and could see nothing.
I had one minute to wait. It was the minute
we had given ourselves to allow for all contingencies. I was sitting in a
tight-closed sphere and I could feel instruments and shelves around me. I
switched on a little light that was operated from a battery pack. I had time to
glance at the instruments and see that they were reading normal. One of them
was a clock. I do not know what I expected. I expected it to speed up, I think.
At noon precisely I felt a sense of vertigo
that abolished instantly all other sensations whatsoever.
VII
The
sensation was
one of nameless horror.
I
had met, and risen above, every kind of spinning and falling sensation and-
zero gravity. We had been chosen and trained at the rocket base for physical
assurance and temperamental stability. I do not pretend to be a superman. But,
sitting enclosed in that sphere while the whole universe became chaos it seemed
to me from the moment the transfer started, I knew that I was being called
upon to endure things that no man should be asked to endure. To say that I knew
then why the mice that had been subjected to the transfer showed signs of
asphyxia would be not quite true. I did not know anything. It was from the
first a sensation that I could not breathe, and that stops most things. And
with it came a sensation that I was being slowly rolled over in space in a most
complicated and remorseless fashion and at the same time bent in another
direction so that I would, if the process continued, be turned inside out.
We had had no idea that I would be subjected
to these sensations. A plan had even been laid down for me about what I was to
do as I sat in the sphere when the transfer started. I was supposed to switch
on my little light, look at all my instruments, and record their readings in my
log book. Then I was to open one of the shutters with which I was surrounded,
look out through the transparent surface of the sphere, glance at my
instruments again, and record what I saw and what the instruments said. It was
to have been a methodical scientific investigation, and just the kind of thing
that I, with my training, was supposed to be able to do. Yet right from the
first, held in a paralyzed horror in which I was unable even to gasp, I knew it
was utterly impossible. I could only endure in that particular nightmare
sensation in which I could not even scream.
It
is impossible to explain how I could have had a sensation of simultaneous
light and blackness. Later, but only after I had arrived after what seemed an
infinite age of endurance, I found that my light had gone out. It was those
eddy currents probably, induced by the magnetic effects of the synchrotron,
that had put unusual currents in the circuit and blown the bulb. But I did not
know that then. As I have said, from the very first instant I did not know
anything. It was only that I felt, that I hoped rather than knew, that all the
stars I was seeing, and the bright lights and grave-dark shadows, and the
sounds that echoed through my helpless and quite horrible vertigo, were
subjective sensations, and products of my mind, and not a universe that had
become a madhouse.
It was not only a physical sensation. From
the first as I fell through that light-dark void, I knew I was in a far greater
danger.
It
had a physical cause maybe. No doubt Galbraith or some doctor could have
explained it to me. It could have been those eddy currents maybe working down
my nervepaths and my ganglions and through the matrix of my brain. But I did
not know that during that dreadful fall through a void that was my period in
the sphere. If I knew anything, if I could have known anything, or thought at
all during that endless period, it would have been something like this: that
there were limits beyond which no man should ever be asked to volunteer and
endure, and these were not limits of pain or physical peril but something more
and worse than that, the dangers that might result in the total destruction of
his personality and turn him out at the end as a different kind of man.
I
did not even know I was sitting in the sphere any more. All I knew was that
there was a danger that I would come out of whatever it was I was in not as
myself, as what I believed to be a man of sense and courage, but as some helpless,
weeping, drooling thing. It was that I had to fight. It was that I had to
struggle against in some fearful and gigantic contest over a spiritual abyss.
And it went on. I had paid no great attention
previously to just how long it took to make the transfer, of the sphere or of
instruments, from the laboratory to the cave. It had not seemed greatly
important, since I had thought I would just be sitting there and making
observations and recording. Maybe I had thought of myself as a camera. We all
had. There was no way we could have found out what it was I would have to
endure. If we had sent even higher animals, apart from mice, it would not
really have shown on them when they came out, for it was the very nature of the
thing that the higher the man involved, and the more developed his nervous
system, his sensitivity and his capacity for reaction, the worse it had to be.
So all I knew, as the seconds passed, and then the minutes, and the lights became
coloured, red, which indicated perhaps how the blood was beating in my brain,
was that I might come out of it dead or maybe, what was present as a fear, a
good deal worse.
It
was a mercy when the sensations began to lessen as my breath-starved body and
my blood-starved brain began to verge towards unconsciousness. It was a mercy
and yet a greater peril, for I felt that if I did give in to it, if I did let
myself go into that particular unconsciousness, I would never come out of it as
myself again.
It
was as though my mind and body were dispersed, and scattered in individual
atoms all through the universe, and I had to hold it all together, hang on
across the spaces of the void, and keep myself together as a coherent whole, or
be lost for ever more.
There
was one thought, one positive actual thought that was in my mind at some time.
It was that this was not all, this transfer, this single outward journey if it
could be called that. Somehow, sometime, I would have to get back.
VIII
There
was darkness and
stillness, and I was me. I did not know I was in the cave. I still did not
"know" anything. I was just sitting there, crouched in the sphere, as
in a womb.
I
was not aware that I had suffered any damage. I knew it was a danger. I knew I
should not just be sitting there in total darkness. I must assert myself. I
must make sure that I was me.
I
put out a hand and felt the sphere around me. I could feel one of the
anti-radiation shutters. I did not know it was a radiation shutter, but I drew
it back.
I sat there seeing again. I could see a scene
before me. At least I had not lost all my senses. I had seen it before. It was
the cave.
After
a time, a sense of satisfaction came to me. I had arrived.
So what should I do now? A little light was
coming into the sphere now I had opened the shutter. I could see shelves around
me, and a log-book, and instruments. Was I supposed to do something about
them? Write in the log book and read the instruments? I began to move around in
the sphere.
I
pushed the top off. I stood up in the sphere, and then stepped out of it. I
stood shakily on a rock-strewn ground. I took off my face-mask and goggles and
oxygen cylinders and put them in the sphere. I stood looking at them. I should
not have done that, I knew. Not right away. Perhaps I was not remembering very
well as yet. It would come back in a little time.
I looked around me.
Yes,
it was a familiar scene. I had seen it before. At least I had seen pictures of
it. I was in a shadowy cave. Rocks were piled across it as a barrier, creating
shadows, and there were more rocks towards the entrance. Also there was a
skeleton.
I started towards the
skeleton.
I
stopped half way. Somehow I did not like that skeleton. I was afraid that it
was going to be real. It was real. Everything was real. The rocks were hard and
felt like rocks. In the silence of the cave they clattered when I moved. Yet it
was not a complete silence. I could see signs of sunlight outside the cave, and
a range of snowy mountains, and somewhere in the distance a bird was singing. I
sniffed the air. That was the reason why I should not have taken my oxygen mask
off at once. I should have tested the air first. Yet it smelled like normal
air: cool perhaps, but dry and tingling, with less moisture than I would have
expected inside a cave.
I
was standing on the barrier of broken rocks that stretched across the cave
between the sphere and the skeleton. I could see two more skeletons now, that
could not have been seen from the sphere. I was supposed to do something. It
was in my mind somewhere. I was supposed to do a series of slow, methodical
things, minutely examining the scene around me, looking at all the machinery
and electrical apparatus, and writing in the log book about its state.
It
did not seem important somehow. I was primarily concerned with the skeleton,
the first one, the one I had seen before taken in a picture by a camera. What
mattered was whether it was actually there or not. What mattered was who it
was, and whether I could actually see it, touch it, feel it. I took my courage
and went to it.
I
was feeling better then. I was feeling better all the time, though I had a long
way to go before I was wholly normal. Yet crouching by that skeleton I felt sad
somehow. It was too real. I put out my hand to touch it and two bones fell
apart with a clatter. I have to be clear about this. My mind, my memories, were
disordered. Yet that did not cloud my physical impressions and responses, but
heightened them. Had there been anything wrong or false about any of my impressions,
I would have felt it. Instead my sense had the clear, whole freshness of a
child's. Things and the world are more real to a child than they are to an
adult, just because he sees them directly and not through preconceptions, and
so it was with me.
The
whole situation I was in, the cave, the rocks, the smashed electrical
equipment, the wreckage of the laboratory, the holes in the roof from which
the rocks had come down, and the outer rock wall that had disappeared, were all
clear to me in a kind of springtime freshness. And I took the skull of the skeleton in my hands and fondled it.
There was no mistaking the smooth, cool touch
of actual bone. That sensation is as clear to me today as are childhood
sensations which one remembers always and which are always more vivid than
anything in adult life.
So, I thought, I had it in my hands. There
was nothing I could do about it. It was there. I got up
with it and took it back with me carefully, moving through the cave to the
sphere, passing the broken control desk on the way.
I carefully put the skull in the sphere and
picked up the upper half of the sphere with outstretched hands, to put it on.
Then I chanced to see the log book on its shelf in the sphere.
I
put down the top again and picked up the log book. I wrote in it, using the
pencil that was clipped to the book and resting it on the upper half of the
sphere as a table to write on.
"I
am sending you the skull," I wrote. "I cannot come back at once. This
journey is very bad. If I never come back and you send someone else, put him in
an iron lung and give him sedatives before you send him."
I
looked at what I had written. As I say, my mind had the simple clarity of a
child. I doubt if I even knew who I was writing to. A million questions
remained unanswered. There was no guarantee that if I let the sphere go back
without me that day, and they sent it the next day from the laboratory, that it
would arrive on the next day in the cave. It might arrive a year later or even
earlier. But my mind was at that time incapable of dealing with such complications.
I only knew, with satisfaction, that I was doing the best I could.
I
put the log book back in the sphere and I put the skull upon it. Then I put the
top back on. I felt that I had discharged my duty, the first things I was
supposed to do, immediately on arrival.
Then
I looked around the cave. Something was in my mind. Someone had said they
wished I could go combat-armed. That implied that there could be a danger. I
could not see any. The cave looked as still as if it had been like that for a
hundred years. I had a memory of a voice saying to me "Take a look around
the laboratory and imprint it on your mind." It was a memory that came to
me because that, the ability to deal with clear, actual impressions, was something
I had very much just then. I was very physical and actual, not less so than
usual but more so, and I stood by the sphere, which I had closed in the deep,
shadowy part of the cave, and looked about me and noticed the things a child
would have noticed.
In the laboratory, in that position by the
sphere, I would have been surrounded by the robot handling machinery,
consisting of metal bars and grips and an array of almost human arms and
joints. I looked around for it. The natural assumption was that it had all been
smashed and buried by the rock-falls. But I looked for it among the rocks, and
it was not there.
I
looked at the skeletons again then. None of them were clothed. It was a simple
and obvious fact. It had been quite visible in the photographs. The clothing,
we had all assumed, would have decayed away. But would it, both the natural and
the man-made fibers, not leaving even a scrap?
I
did not remark on things or note them with surprise. That was not my frame of
mind. I just assumed, on the spot, and naturally, that other men had been in
the cave before me, a long time ago. They had come before the bodies were
skeletons; before they had decayed. They had come in a matter of days after the
great catastrophe, and they had taken metal bars and clothing.
I
went walking and climbing out towards the exit or entrance to the cave then. I
was supposed to do something about that, too. But I was not going to take
photographs and obey my orders. I went with a natural curiosity. I went to
look.
I sat out in the sunlight in the entrance of
the cave when I came to it. I sat on sun-warmed rock and my legs were dangling
over a cliff. Something had happened to the valley. It was no longer the green
and verdant Lake Valley that I knew. Instead, I was in a bare and rocky
landscape that might have been among the mountains of the moon. The stony
valley floor was two hundred feet below me, and the solid hillside of rock that
I was on must have been lifted up and tilted backwards as had other rocks on
the farther valley side. It was only because the great slice of rock had been
lifted bodily that the cave was still intact. Nothing else was.
The
valley was a great rocky canyon, with jagged mountainous hills on the other
side. It was like a view of the earth after the mountains had been upraised but
before the soil had formed. The country was inexplicably dry and barren, too,
and it was only around the great snow peaks that rose beyond the nearer
foothills that clouds were floating. There was rain, or rather snow there, for
the hills were ice. Even the great conical volcano that was smoking there was
iced except for a dark and grimy ice-free area just around its crater-peak. The
stream that flowed down the valley, winding along a stony bed, must come from
that source. It came out of the mountains and descended into the valley by
waterfalls.
My
eye followed the stream down, seeing how here and there, in the surrounding
grandeur and desolation, it had encouraged little patches of green, only
visible when one looked for them but significant of the way that life was
coming back. They were more prevalent further down the valley, and I believed I
could see creatures grazing on them, maybe mountain goats. My eye swept the
scene, then my gaze fixed and held.
From
behind a rocky outcrop, at some distance down the valley, I could see rising a
single line of smoke.
People,
I thought. No other creature made fire but man. And so they had survived then,
those men who had come into the cave, searching desperately, and taken metal
bars and clothing. Somehow, even among the sparse vegetation that was all that
was left after the destruction of the soil, they had survived the cataclysm
that had annihilated all their world.
Sitting
there in the sunlight, and understanding all these things quite calmly, I came
back to myself sufficiently to wonder what I was doing there.
I had been sent to find out what had
happened, had I not? I had been sen': to discover what I could by a process of
scientific observation and detailed, logical thought that, although I was
getting better and recovering from my journey, I did not feel I could undertake
just then.
But
there were men down there, and it seemed to me that the simple, logical thing
to do was to go down and ask them.
IX
According to the clocks and the instrurnents that had been
sent before, the sphere would remain where it was in the cave for about eight
hours. I was remembering this now. Little by little my mind was clearing and my
memory was coming back. I was thankful for this and I almost felt myself. I had
been lucky. There had been a balance about my mind and about my personality
that had brought me through intact. But I still did not want the strain of
detailed technical thought. Instead, it came to me that what I needed most was
a trip down into the valley.
The
idea of walking and climbing, and maybe talking instead of doing technical work
and trying to think, seemed to me so attractive as to be almost beautiful.
I looked about me for some way across the
rocks around me and down the sunlit cliff to the valley floor. There had to be
a way. The cave had been ransacked. It did not look easy at first, but then I
saw it. Below me and sideways, there was a ledge. From the ledge it looked
possible to reach a gulley. The gulley led down, as a crack in the rock-face,
to the valley floor or at least to the great pile of tumbled rocks that must
have fallen away from the cliff below me.
I got up and flexed my body in the sunlight.
It felt all right. I went to the extreme edge of the cave entrance and started
down towards the ledge.
I had been right. My mind, my whole being
felt better when I was climbing. I even believed I was better at it than I
would have been normally. I was less impressed than I
would have been at other times by the drop
below me. I was full of confidence about little things, such as that a foothold
or hand-hold that will hold you when three feet off the ground is equally good
when you are hanging above space at two hundred feet. I worked out along the
ledge.
I
had trouble in the gulley. I admired those men who must have climbed that route
a hundred years ago. They could not have been sure of what they were going to
get when they got there. No more, I thought, was I. I swung round a point and
over a chock stone. At the same time, I thought, it was important to survive.
It
was easier when I reached the great scree or rock fall that sloped away down to
the valley floor. It was no more than a matter of being careful that a rock did
not turn under me as I leapt on it when going down the slope and cause me to
break an ankle or give me a twisted leg.
It was hot in the sunlight. I unzipped my
flying suit, but by the time I reached the valley bottom and was working along
the stream, I realized I did not need it. I was wearing regular trousers and
shirt and sweater underneath, and I took it off, looked around for a
conspicuous rock, and stowed it away beneath it. I felt better then, but found
myself looking at the stream and wondering if it were good to drink. It was
certainly clear and had come down from the mountains. I did not know about
radioactivity or other dangers. I found myself, in my better mental state now,
trying to visualize the readings of my instruments as I had last seen them
when I left the sphere. I hit something awkward there. I had a mental image of
the radiation meter, and it seemed to me that when I had last seen it, it had
been reading less than zero. Its needle had been hard back against the stop.
Negative radiation is an impossibility. I
decided that that meter must have been affected by the transfer just as I had.
It gave me a worry though. If my instruments had been affected by the transfer
this time, then they must have been affected by it on other occasions, when
they had been sent before. We had thought we knew there was no radioactivity or
other dangers in the environment, but I was
well aware by then that there was far too much we did not know.
AH
the same, I could not exist in that place and not breathe or eat or drink. I
found a green patch by the stream, one of the first I had come to, and knelt by
the clear water.
I drank, and then looked at the green
herbage, that I thought
was grass, that I was kneeling on. I looked at it slowly and then wished I had
not drunk that water, or breathed that air or arrived in that place at all.
The
"grass" was composed of tiny reed-like plants. Each one was
different. Some had tiny flowers and some had none. But none of them was like
any plant I had ever seen. Among all their short, close-matted diversity, I
could see not a single plant that I could identify as having seen before.
I looked up at the hillsides of the valley
around me and I felt it almost as an emanation, the sense of
something strange.
I ought to go back; I knew it then. I should
go back to the cave, to the sphere, and sit in it, wait until it took me home,
and think nothing of the shape I would arrive in. For the place was strange and
the valley was strange, and even if it was the future, I had no business there.
Then
I looked down the valley. I could see what lay ahead of me more clearly now.
There were low stone walls enclosing areas by the stream where I believed I had
seen the animals grazing, and I believed I could see the roof of a building. It
was a low stone farm or croft-house, and must be isolated, for I could see
there was no other building for at least a mile.
I
should go and look at the animals, I thought.
It would be stupid to go back and have to say that I had not even looked at
them after having already come so far. And if there were people in the farm,
just an isolated family living, a few words with them only could probably tell
us everything. I would go and ask, exchange a few sentences with them, and
then go back. It seemed simple to me still, and I could see no visible danger whatsoever.
I got up and stood for a moment, and then
walked on. There were heather-like plants, I now saw, growing in tufts between
the rocks. I could hear a bird singing, and the sound reassured me. I looked
for it, being interested in little things.
I saw a bird, the same or another, as I
walked on down the stream. It was sitting on the first of the low stone walls
(hat contained and penned the animals, and for a moment I was fascinated by its
behavior. It was perched there and peering down intently into a crack among the
stones. It was a small brown bird of a kind I could not easily recognize and it
had an attitude of bright alertness and quick, fast movements when it
fluttered as I approached. I thought at first that it was afraid of me, but it
wasn't. It was only that it was excited and eager to get at something that was
hiding from it between the stones, and it prodded from time to time into the
crack with its bill. Its beak was not long enough, and while I watched as I
passed it, it flew down from the wall to the ground and came up again with a
dry stalk of the heather. It began to poke in the crack with that and dug out
and caught and ate its prey, a long and writhing insect. The action looked
perfectly natural and normal. It was only that I felt a kind of wonder about
it, such as the question whether our birds had been in the habit of using
tools.
I
might have thought more about the bird except that now, having reached the
first of the walls, I was able to see the animals.
Sheep,
I thought, or goats. I looked at them as I walked along by the wall. It was odd
not to know which. Some had the wool of sheep and others had the untidy coats
of goats. None of them had quite the right shape for either. When I saw one
that looked like a miniature milk-cow, complete with horns and udders but about
three feet high and with a straggling goat-like coat, I truly began to think.
A dog began to bark at the farm. I had come
near to it now, to the windowless, blank side of the low-roofed building, and I
was approaching it between the rough stone walls. I had not thought of a dog. I
had thought I would go and look before I spoke to anyone. But, picking my way
through the mud, I realized that I was committed. Someone was going to come
out to see what was causing the barking of the dog. I did not want them to see
me back-view, scurrying into the distance. I did not want them to take me for a thief. Even more, I did not want them to
follow me.
I had a moment of doubt then, of reason you
might say. For the first time I wondered if it were truly a wise thing to
appear in an isolated valley, a total stranger in what could only be an
outlying frontier district, asking, as an excuse for his presence, about what
date it was and what had happened to the world a hundred years ago. But I only
thought my mind was fully recovered. I did not see it clearly.
Yet
I was right about the effect of the barking of the dog. A woman came around the
corner of the house. I call her a woman. I have no other word to use. She was
about four feet six, enormously broad, with large bare feet. She was wearing a
dark, shapeless garment, and her head had the shape that is usually associated
with congenital idiocy. I stopped the moment I saw her. I began to think again,
too late. When I first saw her, she was turning, saying something to the dog.
Then she turned and saw me.
It
isn't easy to explain the feeling as we looked at one another. It was the kind
of thing that happens when two animals see one another, strangers, of different
breeds. Their hackles begin to rise. It is the sense of something similar but
at the same time hopelessly alien.
We
solved our problem in different ways, confronting one another across the mud of
the farm-yard between the house, the field-pens and the animal sheds. I took a
step towards her, trying to look friendly. Tin sorry to disturb you," I
said with what I was realizing even then was enormous futility. "I only
want to ask you . . ."
She began to scream.
I understood a little. I understood why
Galbraith and the General had told me to stay around the cave. It was only
after I had spoken that I even began to think and wonder if
English
were the right language. To use it was itself an enormous presumption,
presuming that her world was my world, that the two were connected, within a limited time, by history. It was an assumption I was making that I was
in "the future," and only now, when it came to the point, did I
realize that everything I had seen since I had come out of the cave had seemed
to place me in some space and time that was hopelessly, impossibly remote.
Yet
it came off, that was the incredible thing. Contrary to all evidence, the words
that she screamed back at me were English in a fashion. I could not pretend at
that time to understand the significance of it, or the significance of anything
else, either.
"Go
'way! Go 'way!" she was screaming at me as though I were her enemy.
"We have no childers here!"
I
did not pretend to understand the meaning of the word "childers". I
only reacted to her attitude. I told her:
"I won't harm
you!"
"Go way!" she
screamed again.
"I only want to talk
to you!"
"You mooniesl" she screamed.
"Ill let the dog! We have no childers!"
"I only want to
speak."
"Jeb! Jebl They're
here! A moony's here!"
If
it was someone else she was calling to, I thought, she had no need. He would
have heard her in the first place. But I was not sorry. It was just
fantastically bad luck, I thought, that on making my first contact in the new
world I should have found myself confronted by a misshapen, female, dwarf idiot.
I did my best.
"What's a moony?"
I said.
It actually stopped her screaming. She stood
at the corner of the building with her great bare feet and statuesque ankles,
that looked as though they belonged to some figure ten feet tall, planted in
the mud, and let her mouth fall open and gaped at me.
"I'm not a moony," I said. I went
towards her a little
to convince her of the peacefulness of my intentions.
An
old man appeared, coming round the other corner of the building.
At
a first glance at him I was relieved that he had something like the size and
appearance of a normal man. I do not know what I had been thinking. I was to
think it again soon, but meanwhile I was relieved. I even thought I could place
the situation, the old man and his idiot daughter, the remote farm, and the
fact that he looked thin and starved, near dying maybe, but hanging on with a
sinewy, active life.
"I'm sorry," I said to him, turning
to him. "I only want to ask you . . ."
"He says he's not a
moony!" the woman said.
He looked at me with alarm
and then with a sly, tense grin.
"He
says, "What is a moonyr" " the woman said, and laughed. Even
allowing for what she was, it was not a pleasant laugh.
"A grown archaic who isn't a
moony," the old man said looking at me with an air of total disbelief. I
heard a sound behind me.
I
swung round. I knew it now. I was in a situation
that was developing. It was a simple situation but I did not understand it. I
did not even understand the language, which was English with wide differences,
and I began to have a feeling about the outcome.
And
the man who had come round the field walls and animal sheds behind me made it
clear to me. I use the word "man" about him as I had used the word
"woman" about the woman. It was for want of anything better. And he
was advancing from that direction as though he had gone round there
deliberately to cut me off.
He
had a small, ridiculously tiny head, set on the most massive pair of shoulders
I had ever seen. The neck was short and had almost the thickness of the head.
But the rest of his body did not conform to those proportions. He stood about
seven feet tall, but the barrel of his chest seemed to shrink inwards to the
waist. His belt seemed to hold up a pair of ragged trousers precariously above
a narrow pelvis, and it was his legs that were hopelessly long and thin. I
looked at the bare feet in the mud again. By that time I would not have been
surprised to see them six-toed, or webbed like ducks, or ending in bird-like
claws. It was just that they were incredibly long and thin.
Don't
fight, I told myself. Don't be aggressive. It was contact I wanted, only a few
moments of sane, sensible conversation. I had to tell myself that for the way
he was advancing ort me. I could see it. He had taken one look at me and
determined to attack. I just did not believe it.
"Moony?"
he said. He said it as though it were an important but somehow dirty word.
"You say you ain't no moony?" He had to say it, maybe, to get it into
that tiny skull of his.
"He
ain't Outlands either," the old man said significantly. They began to
close in on me, all three of them. It was just that I could see no reason why
they should attack.
His
arms were long. When he put them out to me, I could get nowhere near him. I did
not want to kick him. I had an idea that I should treat them gently. I was
thinking now, at last, too late, of what Galbraith and the General would say if
I had to go back and say I had wandered from .the cave and done nothing but
succeeded in rousing the fury of the inhabitants. I didn't even take it
seriously until it was too late.
He
held me off, then suddenly dragged me to him in a bear-like hug. We crashed
down onto the ground. I had been right in thinking he could be no great danger
with such a slender middle. But the woman and the old man ran up, the woman in
particular, with a kind of murderous fury. She had grabbed a stake or stone and
was holding my neck to throttle me with one great hand while with the other she
struck out at my head while I fought with the pin-head creature I could not
believe in.
It was the old man to whom I owed my life.
"Don't kill him!" he was saying, though he was kicking me
occasionally as he was dancing round us. "Don't kill him! If he is what he
is, we can sell him to the moonies!"
I
was hearing him say that when I went under, knocked out and almost torn apart
between the three of them.
x
Theih language was English. There was a world of significance
in that.
There
was darkness and an unpleasant smell. I sat up and tried to move and realized I
was tied.
I
lay there for a moment thinking. My mind seemed at last to have come back to
something near its normal. I had made a complete and utter wretched hash of it.
Now I was thinking, I could see that. I could not have acted more stupidly from
the moment I stepped out from the sphere.
Not
merely had I not done all the things I should have done, the detailed log
entries, the minute inspection of the cave, the statements every few minutes of
just what I had done and what I proposed to do next, but I had accomplished the
appalling folly of getting myself captured so that I could not go back
personally to report.
Meanwhile
the pain from my bruised head and ribs was in competition with a new pain from
my wrists and ankles. It was easy to explain. It just indicated the
thoroughness with which I had been tied.
I thought for a moment on another tack. The
creatures who had captured me. Was I sure? Or were they just figments of my
disordered brain? Thinking of them and trying to visualize them as I had seen
them, I could not be sure. If they were true, then I had not actually found out
anything in my excursion from the sphere, out of the cave and into the new
environment. I had only made the problem a thousand times worse.
But it was hard to dismiss them as figments
of my mind when I was lying there in what seemed to be an animal shed or garden
tool store with a feeling of cold discomfort all around me and light, which
must be the last of the daylight, coming in through gaps between the roof and
the dry stone walls and under a lower edge that could only be the bottom of a
crude wood door.
If
they had not been exactly what they seemed to me, they must have been something
like it or I would not be there. And I remembered now. One of the jobs I was
supposed to do around the sphere was to take star sights in the dusk at this
time, and establish the position of Venus if it appeared in the night sky as an
evening star so as to date this time and place exactly. I was to do all that just before I settled myself for my return journey in
the sphere. And the sight of the fading daylight told me I was going to be too
late for it.
In
the laboratory they would get back the sphere empty except for the log book
with the single log entry and the skulk I did not like to think of that, of
Sara being confronted by her own skull as final evidence of the reality of the
world that I was in. What would they do about it? Send someone else? Or
instruments?
I
felt a helpless fury. The pain of my wrists and ankles and of the position in
which I was lying had become severe. I began to sqirm and twist from the waist
and try to loose my bonds. If the people were of such low calibre as I thought,
then they could not have tied me up properly, I thought. I was wrong about
that. Even if my pin-headed friend was a mentally deficient farmer, he had
learned at some time how to tie up a pig, and it did just as well for a man.
Gasping
and struggling, I realized that I could not break my bonds, least of all the
cords or thongs that held my wrists, which were tied behind me. But at least I
could think now. The mist that had been over my mind since I had made the
transfer and suffered in the sphere had at last departed. I struggled and got
myself up into a sitting position against the wall. I felt the rough edges of
the stone with my hands, feeling each projection I could find with my extended
finger tips. I jerked myself along the wall until I found a good one and then,
swaying my body forward and up and down, I began to rub the thongs that bound
me against the quartzite of the rock.
It
would take time. I knew that. I did not know how much time I had. I even had
hopes of getting free and out and back to the sphere that night to begin with.
It took longer than I thought, and I had to see those hopes fade. I rested a
while and then went on again. To get out and free was the main thing. I could
no longer see farther ahead than that.
I was almost free and could feel a slight but
definite loosening around my wrists when a light showed under the door. I kept
suddenly still. I thought it was going past, but it came towards me.
I
sat back as I was against the wall. I could only hope that what I had been
doing would not be discovered. I listened to a fumbling with the door catch and
bars.
The
old man came in. He brought light that smoked and seemed to run on oil of
mutton fat and a pan of some land of food. He held up the light and looked at
me. "So you ain't dead," he said with satisfaction. He cackled in a
way that seemed to me senselessly: "You're like me. You're one ■ of
the old type. You're hard to kill."
I
did not pay great attention to what he was saying. I was thinking that if he
untied my hands to let me feed myself I would throttle him, while if he fed me
I would still have a chance of getting free afterwards.
He gloated over me for a while before he
began to feed me. "I was like you once," he said. "There ain't
many archaics now. How come you're not like Jeb and Molly when you're nearer to
their age?"
I had to pay attention. He was telling me
things unknowingly. I found it hard to believe, but what he was saying seemed
to have a grim significance about the world around me. He put the lamp down and
began to feed me by the simple expedient of putting the pan against my mouth
and tilting it.
"The
moonies want the archaics," he said. "How come the moonies haven't
got you before? Maybe you're an archaic who's escaped from the moonies."
He laughed. "Jeb's gone to sell you back to them. Jeb would sell me to the
moonies except I am too old."
I
spluttered at the food and pushed it away with my chin. I licked it off my lips
and he looked at me solicitously. There was no harm in him, I thought. And then
I thought maybe it was something else. He was thinking of the price they could
get for me. He had said they were going to sell me.
"What
is a moony?" I said. I had asked that question before, before they
captured me. It seemed safer to ask it again than to ask what was an archaic.
Besides, I had guessed what an archaic was. It was someone who looked like me.
The word "moony" was what shook me.
If anything, and in my desperate state of ignorance, I supposed it implied that
the world had been invaded by creatures from the moon. I could even imagine
myself telling that to the General if I did get out.
His reaction was to look angry and disgusted.
A wretched look came into his eyes. He was disappointed. He had been hoping too
much. It was like something at the dead lowest point of human experience.
"It could be your head," he muttered, but he was talking to himself,
not me. It was only about me, as he held the pan at me again: "It's your
memory. They won't buy you if you're like that." He took the pan away.
He could keep the pan so far as I was
concerned. I was hungry, but not that badly. "What's a moony?" I
said. "You're right, I've lost my memory. What is a moony?"
There may be lower things in life, in a more
wretched state, than my conversation with the old man, but if so I have not
come across them. The whole fact of being in his world with him, and taking it
as representative, that cattle shed or outhouse, had a grim macabre quality.
Even to say it was grim was not quite right. It was something worse.
He
shook his head over me and began to talk, partly to himself and partly to me in
a doleful voice, in an old man's way. He held the pan but did not seem sure
whether he was going to give it to me again or not. It looked as though he
would rather keep it for himself.
"I
knew one once," he said. "Third generation, grand-childer like you.
Looked fine too, but had no memory." His eyes became misty. He was looking
into the distance. "Right shape, right size. Maybe fifteen years old, this
kid was, by the time I knew him. Parents had hid him. Can you believe that.
Living in moonity territory, they hid him. They kept him for themselves. They
were crazy. These days, who can trust their neighbors?"
He took a taste from the pan himself. He had
lost sight of his aim to feed it all to me. He seemed to like it.
"They
could have known that by fourteen, fifteen he'd begin to wander around a
little,"he said. "Even here, in this valley, on the fringe of the
outlands, they couldn't keep him secret. Someone must have give him away. They
say Garman, three farms down the valley, got a pasture mower. The moonies came
and took him. Parents were punished too. They'd had him all that time, a real
archaic so far as anyone could see. So they were punished, and then the moonies
didn't keep him. No memory, you see. He wasn't a real archaic. Not a Tooknaker.
He only looked it. So they'd lost their farm, but they got him back. Deceiving
themselves, I guess. Thinking he, not the farm, was a thing of value."
He
ate out of the pan methodically, sitting there in the smoky light in the
outhouse. He too was deceiving himself, I thought. He was going to tell someone
he had given all that to me. He used his fingers to get the food out, then
licked them one by one reflectively.
"They
might have known. He was a bit like you," he said. "Not that he
couldn't speak. He'd leam the words and then forget them. Learn quick, too.
He'd leam to speak in the course of every day. Then the next day he'd forgotten
and have to start again. They were glad to have him back. He looked all right.
Even behaved well in a kind of way. Then one night he took a knife to his
mother. His father had to kill him. Thought his mother was his girl friend. I
guess he had forgotten. The sort of thing a mutant kid might do. We've had a
lot like that."
He
seemed to derive a satisfaction from his macabre story, as much as from the
food. He looked at me in a hopeful, puzzled way.
"You
try to remember," he said. "You try to look and behave like a real
archaic, at least until they've paid for you."
He
got up then. He turned to the lamp and took the pan with him. I thought he was
going out. But he did not start for the door as I expected. He turned to me.
"Turn over, son. I
want to see your wrist-tie."
I
had thought I was all right. I had let him go on talking, and then, at the last
moment, he remembered to see if I was still well tied. I strained at the thongs
around my wrists but I had just not got far enough and they would not break.
"Turn
over!" he said and began to kick me. In another moment he was calling
"Molly! Molly!"
They
tied me up again, and anchored me to a spot where I could do no harm, and left
me there all night
XI
I had
had time to reflect.
They told me that the moonies were coming for me in the morning and I wondered
if they would have long bodies and heads on stalks and perhaps six legs. They
hadn't. But I was only just discovering that the big thing about a quite new
environment is that you don't know just how new it is.
I
heard voices outside the outhouse, drifting in like the full morning daylight
from under the door. They sounded like human voices. They even had an English,
or rather American, inflection. It was one of those questions I could not
solve. The people seemed to be talking my language in a world that had no
connection with my world. Either we were wrong about the time-scale, I thought,
and the time was not a hundred years but maybe a few thousand years ahead,
perhaps a million, or something far more radical had happened to our world,
far more sudden and fundamental, than even we had suspected.
The door opened and a blonde stood framed in
the doorway, standing against the sunlight. The climate was like that. Except
over the high mountains where clouds drifted they had constant cloudless
sunshine.
I
checked, looking slowly up at her from the feet. I was taking nothing for
granted now. The feet could be normal. They were encased in rough effective
leather boots that looked as though they had done plenty of walking, like a
foot soldier. I hoped for something of the legs, but they were human, too
human, and on the plump side, which was emphasized by the fact that she wore
rough and probably homespun trousers. Her hips were of the beamy kind that
look worst when encased in hard-boned corsets and best when in the nude. Her
sheepskin jacket was open, showing the proportions of a well-developed and
not-young female. At least she was human, I thought. Then I recognized that she
was more than blonde. She was an albino.
"Have
them bring him outl" she said, coming in then backing out again. "We
don't want to examine him in there!"
Jeb
came in, eager and anxious to please. He began to drag me out and then thought
better of it and cut my foot bonds. He prevailed on me to get up, and I managed
to stagger, feeling pins and needles through my feet. But I went out, out into
the blessed sunshine and open air and swore I would die rather than go into
that hole again.
Molly and the old man were standing around
too with that NMine
eager look. It might have
been an attempt to sell a cow. The girl albino had someone else with her, a man
of the Mime
proportions who was equally
an albino. They might have been brother and sister, and later I realized they
probably were.
Just the fact that they had been summoned and
had come seemed to indicate that there was something, however, beyond the
valley. Not the whole world was like I had seen it ■In the valley and the
mountains. There had to be a civilization somewhere, of some kind, down in the
direciton to which the valley led.
"Are you going to untie my hands as
well?" I said. There was nothing like hoping.
They
had both spent about twenty seconds examining me narrowly.
"An
archaic," the girl said positively, having assured herself at last. It was
like a bird-watcher will point definitely and say: "Look, a ring-necked
double-quilled ouzel-touzell"
Her
twin brother's view of the situation was more dispassionate than hers. He was
wearing a gun in a holster, which gave him an authority of position, and even
though It was just an ordinary, and even rather large and therefore
out-of-date style of gun by our standards, he had a deliberate restraint and
was looking at my clothes.
"He doesn't make much
sense," he said.
I
kept my mouth shut. I had a feeling that, given that situation in that farmyard
I was not going to make much sense whatever I said.
"What is it that he's wearing," the
girl said.
I
was wearing my sweater, shirt and trousers, and it is unkind to say this, but
though most of my garments contained a proportion of artificial man-made
fibres, and I had spent the night in them, and in the outhouse, they were still
better, in better shape and neater, than anything anyone was wearing round me.
"This could be big trouble," the man said. "Those are
genuine antiques. He must have found a source of supply somewhere. He must have
dug them up."
He
made it sound as though I had committed a crime by acquiring and wearing
garments that conspicuously dated from my own civilization. Yet it was what I
would have done if I could and if I had been in their position. What I had was
conspiuously better than theirs.
I
thought about it. It seemed to me that the game was up. He had the gun and my
hands were still tied, and there was an uncertain future ahead of me. Sooner or
later I was going to have to tell them, or try to tell them, the truth. I was
not going to be able to get away with some invented story to explain my
presence, because in their environment, and in connection with their unknown
civilization, I did not know what story to invent.
"These
clothes do come from a different period of history," I said. "Our
estimate is that it's a hundred years ago. You are right except for one thing.
I didn't dig them up or steal them. I myself come from then."
It
was a good try anyway. My statement was received in dead silence.
"An AntiquistI"
the girl said.
It was a new word. You know how it is when
you Ieam a language. To begin with I was confused between "An
Antiquist" and "archaic".
"An archaic
AntiquistI" the man said, and whistled softly.
I
saw Jeb looking puzzled and at the same time hopefully avaricious as he watched
us. Perhaps he hoped to get paid more for that.
"Where do you say you come from?"
the girl said to me.
I
pointed generally up the valley, of which we had a good view from the farmyard.
I could see the cave from there, but I was not going to point it out to them
unless or until my story was accepted and I could see in what attitude it would
be received. "I came dowji from there," I said.
"An Outlanderl"
the girl said.
"An archaic, Outlander
AntiquistI" the man said.
I had only to listen to his tone of voice to
know I had got in deeper.
He
looked at the girl. "We've got to be careful," he said. "Before
we know where we are we will find ourselves suspected for having been exposed
to contact."
She
looked at me and she looked at him. "I suppose we'd better take him
in," she said. T don't think there's anything about that?"
"I
will get paid?" Jeb said in a thin, high, eager voice. "You shut
up," the man said. "You'll get paid sometime, if at all."
"I mean it's a three-hour walk,"
the girl said. "That's a long time to be exposed to contact."
I
wondered if they were mad or if I was. With my hands still tied behind me, I
stared at each of them and at Jeb and Molly and the old man. "What's this
about contact?" I said. "I come from a past time. I know that sounds
a tall story. I don't even expect you to believe it right away. I agree you
should take me to someone who will believe me, someone with knowledge of the
past to whom I can prove it. But this is urgent! I've got to get back to the
thing that brought me here. I'm in peril of being marooned here. But don't
start talking about the dangers of contact. It's not as though I've been
exposed to some disease!"
It
was quite a speech, and, considering the position I was in, I said it firmly,
in a way that I believed would carry weight.
Considering
the man with the gun was an albino, it was impossible to say, but I believe he
paled a little.
"You're right," he said to his
sister. "He's a bad case. He's carried it to the point when he actually
believes he comes from the past, by some kind of self-hypnosis. I'm going to
radio them to send a psycho!"
"The helicopter?"
she said. "Oh, Dan, be careful!"
"What's it for?"
he said. "Except in an emergency?"
"But if we call it out
and it isn't needed!"
"You
want to be suspected of Antiquism all your life?" he said. And he hurried
away, around the corner of one of the walls. He came back with a portable pack
they must have brought with them and dumped at the first opportunity. It looked
like a walkie-talkie from World War Two. He began to run up an aerial antenna.
As
he began to be busy, I began to look at the way out between the walls and down
to the stream and up the valley.: I still had my hands tied, but I believed I
had a chance.: There are probably difficulties any time, in any civilization,
anywhere, in convincing people that you come from another era, another age. The
normal fate of anyone who says it is; probably to be locked up as a lunatic or a spy. But in their age, in their society, there were very particular
difficulties,: as I was beginning by then to gather.
It
was not that Dan saw me looking or guessed my intention to make a bolt, hands-tied, up the valley. He thought, of something else. He left
his bulky and awkward transmit-i ter pack
and came and gave the girl his gun.
"Keep him covered," he said.
"If he talks to you in any J
way that seems likely to
convince you, shoot him in the head. ?
It'll save a lot of trouble." i
"Right," said the girl, pointing the gun at me as he went |
back. "Now you can tell me the true story and explain j
yourself. You tell me. You
are an Outlander? We badly need!
some information about the Outlandsl" J
"Abracadabra-cadee," I said. I
could see she had that gun
cocked and ready and would be all too calmly ready to fire
at me. I was in my right mind now. My intelligence was
working one hundred percent. What it told me was that I ,
was sinking ever deeper into a situation that did not make ;
sense and in which I could not win. In that case, I worked j
it out, I could do worse
than feign simple madness. I
But
Dan was busy working with his radio pack and talk- ' ing into the built-in
microphone. It was all wrong. I had an awful feeling just how much it was all
wrong. The radio itself was more than half the trouble. Even in our time all ,;
such radios had been transistorized and made much smaller. 4 Then there were their clothes, and the gun the girl was fl holding. It
was not a relic, or I thought it was not. It looked J quite new. But the design was that of an old-fashioned revolver of an
early date, the kind of thing that required no great intricacy of workmanship
or casting.
Even
when, an hour later, the helicopter came wliirring up the valley, I looked at
it with awe. I had never seen a crate that looked quite so patched. It looked a
relic. And it all added up to the supposition, which was somewhere in my mind,
that the world had not gone forward, but slipped back at least a hundred years.
XH
Thank God, I thought. If the conversation was no
better,
and made no more sense, at least it was more sophisticated
now. ^
We
were in the helicopter, flying down the valley, in which I could see the
scattered farmsteads. I could see one larger building in the distance, which
was where Dan and his sister were going to take me at the end of the three-hour
walk. The helicopter was not going there.
"You
can talk to me!" he said reassuringly, as reassuringly as a tone can be
when it is bawled out in a helicopter. "You can even talk of Antiquism to
me! I don't have to shoot you. I have dealt with too many cases. I am immune!"
His
name was Liebnitz. I had asked him if that was his father's name, working on
the principle that I had once known a Liebnitz. He had looked at me queerly and
said stiffly that he had chosen it.
I
was in handcuffs and he was a small man with small features and a large head.
He was taking no chances. As well as having me secured, he had the helicopter
pilot to help to handle me. The helicopter pilot was a normal, straightforward
six-foot male, who handled the machine with a kind of fatalistic caution. I did
not blame him. I too felt it was liable to die or break apart beneath us at any
moment. But Liebnitz treated pilot and helicopter alike with a sublime indifference,
the indifference of the large-headed, intellectual and wholly non-mechanical
man. In our world he would have been another freak, another kind of misshapen
dwarf, but there he had authority, he talked in a way that he at least seemed
sure made some kind of sense, and I had to treat him hopefully as though he
were some kind of human.
"Can you understand this?" I
bellowed back to him above the engine noise. "I don't want to talk to you
about Anti-quism or any other kind of theory! I don't expect you to believe my
story. It isn't the kind of story anyone normally would believe. But why don't
you check it? Why assume I came from somewhere else when I can take you and
show you and prove to you that the first time I stepped out into your world was
from a cave?"
Through
the nose of the helicopter I could see beyond the valley now. The hills fell
away in barren, sweeping stony hillsides, and beyond them was a plain.
"I sympathize!" he said in his high
and intelligent but slighdy squeaky voice. "You nomad Outlanders naturally
want to keep your resting places a secret. But that doesn't mean you have to
invent some fantastic story!"
"I
am not an Outlander!" I said. "If I were, don't you think I would
invent some story that wasn't quite so fantastic? Do I seem to you like one of
those creatures in the place where you found me, who have no intelligence whatsoever?"
In
the confined space in the helicopter he put his big head nearer to me to cut
down the need for shouting.
"On
the contrary, you strike me as very intelligent. We are very pleased to get
you. With luck, I hope to make plans to use you. Most Outlanders we get are of
the wild kind. We know you exist, of course, you Outlanders of a higher class,
but you don't usually come wandering into the jurisdiction of the
Community!"
"Then why the hell should II" I
stopped. Community, I thought. MooniesI Had someone said "the
moonity"? Things were at the same time simpler and more complicated than I
thought. In the helicopter I was simultaneously trying to build up a picture of
the world around me from words and phrases and hints and half-hints, and at the
same time argue with a man called Liebnitz who became more ingenious in his mistakenness
every minute.
"Listen!"
he said. As the helicopter bobbed in an air-pocket, he laid a hand on my
manacled arm. "We know you are an Antiquist. Most Outlanders are! Why else
should they be Outlanders and either have refused to join or at some time left
the Community? But I am a psychologist. You don't have to try to hide these
things from me. I know why you tell me this extraordinary story of coming from
the past. All slightly mental people do it! They try to hide their real
beliefs, but at the same time they reveal them, as though in a parable, another
way. I only had to hear you begin to speak and I knew it was your Antiquist
sympathies you were revealing to me in this story of coming from the
past!"
You
can't win, I thought. Least of all can you ever win with a psychologist.
Liebnitz was the kind of man who, if you said black's white would say that
proved you were insane and if you said white was white would say that proved
you were concealing something. They had advanced all right in one way in a
hundred years, I thought looking out across the plain ahead. They were even
more ingenious than they had been in our time.
The
plain was mosdy dusty and barren, but there were farms and green patches here
and there where the streams from the mountains wandered and meandered into it.
I tried to see what was ahead.
"You
say you have plans to use me?" I said desperately. "Just what does
that entail?" I had reached the point where
I felt that the best I could do would be to
get to know the worst.
"Ah!"
he said. "You are an archaic, like the pilot here, and that means of
course that you will be under the jurisdiction of my friends the
biologists." The helicopter lurched, and he had to pause. I did not know
if it was an air pocket this time, or if it was just that the pilot was sitting
with his ears pinned back and could hear our conversation and did not like the
reference to himself. "But I have plans for you tool" Liebnitz went
on. "Even as an Outlander, a man of your intelligence is educable. I'm
sure you are!"
I
could see a distant sheen through the haze across the plain ahead. The sea, I
thought! But the sea in the middle of Tennessee? It wasn't. I had the relief of
knowing that. I could see the faint, hazy shapes of mountains beyond it. It
must be a lake.
"I
wonder if I can convince you that I haven't time to wait to be educated?"
I said.
"Outlander
Antiquism is a natural but only a superficial growth," he said. "It
is only ignorance. It does not have the vicious quality of the Antiquist Heresy
among the disaffected elements in the city."
We seemed to be talking
different languages.
"After
all, it is time the Community began to expand," he said with a glance at
me. "We are strong enough now to increase the territory we hold around the
city. It is a matter of reintroducing civilization across the world. It will be
a convenience if you are educable. We don't want to have to kill you all!"
His glance was asking me how I, as an
Outlander, reacted to the idea of being ruled by the Community, which I interpreted
as being ruled by men like him. I didn't. Not being an Outlander, I had no reaction
at alL and besides, I was only attending to him with half my mind. I was trying
to make out what it was I could see by the lake ahead.
"It
will gready affect our plans if I can show that you can be educated to become a
good and loyal and orthodox member of the community," he said.
"How soon, if I cooperate and become
educated, can I get for myself the ordinary freedom of a member of your
Community?" I said.
It
was, as he said, a city. The ground was greener towards the great patch of
silver water that was the lake, and I could see buildings and an urban area
spread out in a sprawl by the lake-shore right ahead. There was no doubt about
it that that was where we were going, and I was glad it was not farther from
the cave. But the lake was vast. I could see now that it was virtually an
inland sea. The mountains far beyond it were still hazy ice-topped peaks. They
hung in the distance all around the horizon, and there seemed to be no outlet.
The lake was fed by the rivers from the mountains, and it must keep pace with
their input by evaporation in that rainless area. My God, I thought. The
climatic and geographic change was such that it must involve all the world.
"As
an archaic, you can expect to be under some surveillance always,"
Liebnitz told me. "Genetically, as an archaic Outlander, you will
naturally be of great interest to our biologists, and, forgive me for saying
this, but there is bound to be some doubt about your loyalty: it is to be
expected that you will have a hankering for the situation before the Great
Catastrophe."
The helicopter was slanting
in towards the city.
I felt tension inside me. This was it, I
thought. For the first time I had a chance to ask it, of an intelligent man who
knew. This was what I had come for. I had the chance to get the
information even if, as yet, I could see no way to take it back.
I said: "What was the
Great Catastrophe?"
I
found Liebnitz staring at me as though I had let him down.
"Don't do that!" he said. "I
thought you were going to cooperate and we were going to try to see what we
could do together! And what good is that? And who do you expect to fool by
those tactics? What good does it do, least of all with me, to pretend to an
ignorance that you can't possibly have?"
The only effect of my question was to make
him thoroughly disgusted with me as the helicopter came in downwards,
slanting towards the city, at which I stared unbelievingly since it was not in
the least what I expected.
XIII
As we came down, dropping out of the sky towards the
rooftops, the pilot turned to me and said: "We call it Center City!"
- They might, I thought. They might have some such name for this noble
city of the future. I looked around for the skyscrapers, for the innumerable helicopters
hovering in the air, for the magnificent parkways and the buildings laid out in
pastel shades. There weren't any.
I
was still under difficulties with preconceptions in my mind. Ask anyone what a
city or place will be like a hundred years from now and he'll tell you it must
be one of two ways, either a magnificence and a store of wonders or a burnt-out
crater, a shell of atomic ash.
The
actual Center City as I saw it had that force that comes from being in the
centre between extremes. I had an idea about the atomic ash business. I had
seen enough of the inhabitants of the world by then. The reduced population of
the world, the freakish nature of the men who were there, and the variations in
the animal and even the vegetable species, to my mind, made the General's
thesis the most likely. I was in a post-catastrophe era following an atomic
war. I had yet to discover if the hypothesis was tenable.
The
only things I could not reconcile with it were the changes in the geography,
the climate, and the mountains.
It
did not explain the low, stone-faced houses or the horse-drawn transport in the
cobbled streets.
Horses? Well, they looked like horses from
above as we slanted down to the grass-grown air-strip, that was an airstrip
because it had not been built upon hut which was otherwise neglected.
The
city was one of those places that had grown and not been planned. It had been
built by men picking up stones and making houses for themselves wherever they
could find a vacant plot of ground. The results were, shall we say,
picturesque. There seemed to have been a great variety of men building a great
variety of different kinds of houses. I could see a few notable public
buildings, maybe hospitals or schools, and one big one away on a headland or
hill that placed it in silhouette against the lake. But the rest was an
all-too-human muddle of unplanned conflict of ideas and winding streets. And
this was the city, without a car, a public service vehicle, or even a railway
track in sight, that Liebnitz had just told me was out to restore civilization
and conquer the known world, which I took to be the meaning of the Outlands.
"Hold on," said the pilot.
"She doesn't manuever very easily when we're near the ground."
He
played safe with the ancient helicopter and came down and landed us well away
from any of the buildings around the landing strip. Looking out of the
helicopter I saw one hangar and one other aircraft there, apparently under
repair for it was in pieces. For a community about to go to war, I thought, the
city people had the least mechanical sense of any I had met.
It was not just an abstract speculation.
Service vehicles were coming out across the strip to meet us, and they were
horse-drawn.
I took it in slowly. It was not that I was
mentally dumb or stupid. It was just that it took a little time to take it in. A fuel tanker was coming out to the helicopter. It consisted of a barrel
or drum on wheels drawn by a longhaired, big-footed creature I took to be a
pony. The driver could have been human. He might also have been an unusually
dark-skinned and shrivelled chimpanzee.
Atomic
disaster or whatever it had been, I could see they had had difficulties to
contend with in getting civilization going again.
A
trap was also coming out across the landing strip. I mean a two-wheeled vehicle drawn by what might best be described as a
long-legged, high-stepping donkey. It had two men in black uniforms in it.
Generally speaking, they belonged to Jeb's type: small round heads over bodies
that might have belonged to Greek gods except that an excess of shoulders gave
them a disproportion. Intelligence, presumably an intelligence of the calibre
of Liebnitz, had been at work, I could see. Given the varieties into which
humanity had split up following the genetic effects of atomic disaster or
whatever it was, I could not think of a better suitability for police.
The
only vehicle that was coming to us the purpose of which I did not wholly
understand was a horse-drawn four-wheeled carriage. The creature was almost
presentable. It had a vague resemblance to a horse that had not, shall we say,
had too many cows in its ancestry. It was driven by a tall, Asiatic-looking,
elongated and swan-necked driver. And in the back of the carriage, travelling
in some state, and lord of all he surveyed, was another big-headed, pint-sized,
slender-bodied dwarf like Liebnitz.
"Doctor
Selwyn is coming," Liebnitz said. "Stay where you are for a
moment." And he began to get down from the helicopter.
I
looked at Liebnitz and the newcomer as he went out to meet the carriage. They
were of a type all right. Perhaps, I thought, there were only a limited number
of types that humanity could split up into, assuming diversification over a
period of a few generations following genetic damage. But Liebnitz had a kind
of intriguing, human curvingness, while the newcomer, who had been named to me
as Selwyn, had a firmer, harder outline. He might have been blueprinted by
Picasso, I thought. Life imitates art. It is the best argument I know for the
supression of the artist.
The
pilot had turned to me quickly when Liebnitz got out. He kept his voice down.
"Who
are you?" he said. "Have you any power where you come from in the
Outlands?"
He
was talking swiftly and intensely. It was that I think that convinced me that
there was life going on and wheels within wheels and that I had better learn as
fast as I could about the way things worked in Center City.
"I
don't come from the Outlands," I said, eying him cautiously. "The
story that I told your big-headed friend is the truth."
"Don't give me that," he said.
There was an anxious, almost despairing note in his voice. "We haven't
got the time."
I
looked at him steadily. He was not going to believe me any more than anyone
else was. He was trying to get somewhere, to get something out of me, too.
What could I do? I played it for what it was worth:
"Yes," I said.
"I am important. I have some power."
It
sounded a good, safe thing to say. Human nature could not have changed that
much, even in Center City.
"Will you help
us?" he said.
He
was a normal man, what I knew they now called an archaic.
"How about helping me to get out of
these?" I showed him my handcuffed hands.
"Well help you," he said hurriedly.
"Not here. Not now. This isn't the time or place."
Liebnitz had said a few words to the Picasso
dwarf in the carriage. He was corning back.
"When is?" I
said.
"We'll contact
you," he said.
Liebnitz
was coming to the helicopter and waving to me to come out to him. The pilot
turned away and began to look at the instruments on his, panel as though there
was something wrong with
them or as though he had
some urgent work.
"Make it soon," I said to the pilot, and got out of the helicopter. The pilot's back painfully paid no attention to me.
Liebnitz
indicated that I should get in the carriage. The police
were sitting motionless but Watching me with the steady hopeful patience of
strong-arm men.
I waved the handcuffs at Liebnitz. I had
difficulty in getting down from one vehicle and up into the other. "What's the matter, do you think I'll subert your city?" I said
to him. He looked at me narrowly.
The
Dr. Selwyn looked
at me narrowly too, running his eyes over me with
an anatomical and explicit interest. He seemed
pleased by what he saw. "We
could release him
now," he said. "He'll
not escape now he's in the
city; the women will see to that."
"I'm not so sure," said Liebnitz. "There's been a
change in his state of mind."
All
the same, as the carriage
moved off, with the police following, he took out a key and released my wrists, maybe so they would not have to take me as a prisoner through the streets towards which we were heading through the
airfield gate. I promptly looked around for a way to escape. Neither
of them could stop me if I leaped from the carriage, I guessed.
It was just a matter of finding an alley to duck down to escape from the police. It was true I had been heartened by my talk with the pilot
but I was far from placing too much confidence in
him. He had too little confidence in himself.
I only understood what Selwyn meant when
we began to move out into
the streets of the town. It was
like a royal progress but productive of the utmost
of embarrassment. The
first woman we passed was
tall and swan-necked, an ethereal vision that had somehow gone oddly wrong. She turned to look, then looked again and waved and began to follow the
carriage. She
attracted the attention of a matron who was tubby round the middle, who looked and began to follow
too. They cut through the traffic and all the other
pedestrians,
nnd soon we had a following of females of all shapes and sizes. I wanted to
crawl under the seat at that point. I had never attracted such enthusiasm
before. I did not like it. It was like being a fertility symbol produced naked
and exposed, and there was not one of the growing crowd of women who was
natural, normal, or whom I would not have run to get away from.
"Your
friend seems to have a peculiar innocence," said Selwyn with a malicious
grin aside to Liebnitz. "Can it be that he has been unaware of the role of
an archaic in our community?"
XIV
I
They
spoke to the
driver, who whipped up his horse for a little and succeeded in leaving the
growing female crowd. It did not last for long. Another began to collect. The
process had to be repeated at intervals. And this was the time I was trying to
get a view in detail of Center City.
We
were heading down a main thoroughfare so far as I could gather in the general
direction of the lake, and I looked
around at the low-fronted, stone-built, slate-roofed houses, the variety of
vehicles and the even more varied pedestrians who formed the population of the
city. We were sitting facing one another in the open carnage, and I said, maybe
sharply, to Selwyn,
"What is the role of
an archaic in your community?"
I
was too worried to stick at describing myself as an archaic.
Liebnitz and Selwyn exchanged those malicious
smiles as we made our royal progress. I had a sudden awful feeling. What was
their reaction, envy? I wondered about something of which I had not dreamed of
thinking before: about just how their kind, with their exceptionally large
heads and exceptionally small bodies, would breed. It didn't seem probable or
even likely. And as I looked around me at the enormous variety of humanity and
post-humanity in the streets of the city, I found my mind was full of
questions.
"He
is in that state of ignorance?" Selwyn said to Lieb-nitz.
"I
told him he would be in the charge of the the biologists," Liebnitz said
to Selwyn.
"All
that you were telling mel" I said to Liebnitz. I felt indignant. I looked
about me. I felt I might have done better to escape by leaping out of the
helicopter. "All that about how you needed me for psychological reasons,
as an experiment in education . . ."
"That
too," said Liebnitz smoothly. "Dr. Selwyn and I are friends. We work
together."
"In
what? To what?" I stared at Selwyn. "What do you do?"
As
we rolled through the city, Selwyn looked at me with measured pride and
satisfaction.
"Naturally,
as a human biologist and geneticist in the radiation and post-catastrophe era,
I work to find the Line."
He
was complacent about it, as though it were something overwhelming and quite
obvious.
"The
Line? What line? I'm not with you. As I told your friend Liebnitz!"
"Please
don't begin on your fantasies again," Liebnitz said. "We know you are
an Antiquist with dreams of ancient grandeur. But fortunately, from Selwyn's
point of view, it does not affect the genes."
Selwyn raised a slightly languid hand and
indicated a building we were passing. Set back a little from the thoroughfare
that led through the city towards the lake, it was a school.
I was observing like mad. It was not until I
saw the more varied children that I realized that I had been becoming
accustomed to the pedestrian sidewalk crowd of adults that filled the city.
They were not infinitely variable. If you listed five main types, the albinos,
the tall wide-shouldered like Jeb, the squat like Molly, the big-heads like
Selwyn and Liebnitz, and the small and chimpanzee-like; then the major
remaining differences were between the sexes. The swan-necks like our driver
and a proportion of the women could be an F2 cross. I wished I could remember
more biology. I wished I could remember the elementary principles of genetics.
For a moment I even wished I was not a physics-and engineering-trained rocket
man.
For the children were a
riot.
They
were seething in a playground. We were passing the school at a time when they
were indulging in the normally humanly-murderous activities of children turned
out to play in a level stretch enclosed by buildings. But they had swan necks
and squat middles. They had albino hair combined with large shoulders and/or
long legs. They had the bodies of one kind and the threshing limbs of another.
And some were like nothing on earth. I even saw one who looked as though he
were covered with narrow scales.
"We
have not got the Line yet," Selwyn said as we drove past in the carriage.
"We never will, uniformly, of course. There are bound to be a number of
divergent kinds. But all the same, you must admit that we do better than you do
with your unrestricted breeding in the Outlands."
"Better
than I do!" I said. For a moment I found it hard to remember that they
unshakeably believed me to be an Out-lander, a member of another community or
way of life of which I could not begin to imagine the details.
"The Line," said Liebnitz, speaking
to me patiently as the carriage moved on, telling me things that I, as an
Outlander, could not be expected to know too clearly, "is the eventual
supra-human stock which must obviously emerge when the period of Discontinuity,
the Rift, is over."
More
words, I thought hopelessly. How could I understand the period, the place, the
situation I was in, the fantastic and full-blown complexity of a civilization,
even though they were willing to tell me, when I did not know the words?
Driving through that fantastic city I had a sense of disorientation. I
was becoming lost.
It did not improve my situation that Selwyn
began to
speak to me severely. He was a biologist, I had understood.
But he chided me. Maybe his science was a religion. At
least it produced a morality:
"You are wrong in your wild,
unprincipled breeding in the
Outlands, whether you believe in it on the grounds of Anti-quism or
not," he told me coldly. "You don't, I imagine.
You just slide into it from your sickening desires and lusts.
I don't know if Liebnitz can ever reform you.
I would not attempt the thing myself. But our aim is to save a million years
of anguish, pain and conflict. You do not know it, you" do not understand
it, but in nature there is nothing more terrible and cruel than the survival of
the fittest. What worse method is there than slow war, starvation, conquest and
extermination to find out which is the higher species? Yet a million years of terror is what you will bring into being by; your
refusal to think, your reaction to the Great Catastrophe, your conduct in the
Outlands."
Selwyn spoke coldly and severely, like a
schoolteacher on an outing who had cause to reprimand a wayward child, but
Liebnitz took him up and seemed momentarily inspired by him.
"It is not only that!" he said,
looking at me with an
excitement that seemed to come from inside him. "What kind
of super-man will the emergent species be when the Rift,
the Discontinuity, the period of radiation, ends? What do
we want him to be? A man like you archaics, a toolmaker
with mechanical genius who is skilled in war? Or something
still more fiendish and effective? A master of treachery, sav-
agery, heartless and fiendish in all his actions? Those are the
survival-virtues! That is what may come out of human
selection in its next stage! But we impose on life our will,
our purpose. It is time that man took charge of his own
destiny and did not leave it in the hands of a God called
Nature!" j
"To create a creature of peace and
beneficence and refinement," Selwyn said. "That is our object in
controlling breeding in this period of change that your people, the archaics,
our ancestors, have left us. To see that it is not a worse man who triumphs,
but a better man. In fact to create him. To use creative biology, the greatest
genius of man, to build him. To bring him into being before the Rift-period of
radiation ends. Is that not a good thing? Then why do you fight us and defy us
and deny us? It is no more than ignorance and superstition in you, you
Outlanders and Antiquists."
They
were talking so much, and I was so confused, that I did not realize we were
arriving until the carriage rumbled through a guarded gateway into the
courtyard of a building. I was sitting with my back to the direction we were
going and I only turned in time to get a glimpse of it as we went in.
It was the big building I had seen in the
distance at the time when we were landing. It was the one magnificent edifice
in the city, in the centre of the city but on higher land and above the lake
shore. It was a temple, I thought, or the city's central offices, or the
prison, the Bastille of a dictatorial and oppressive government, or perhaps all
three.
XV
We
emerged onto
a mosaic-tiled terrace with buildings with galleries on pillars on three sides
around, and I thought I had never seen a place before that so much combined the
atmospheres of a palace and a prison.
The inner entrance, through which we passed
when we left the carriage, was also guarded, and then, as we came out onto the
terrace, I saw that its fourth side was a parapet above the lake and I sensed
the atmosphere of strangeness and luxury.
What
was strange was that, after the city we had just passed through, I should find
it strange to see that the people, and above all the girls who were sitting on
or standing by the parapet and idly talking until they turned on hearing us
enter, were normal, healthy young women of my own land, and what everyone else
called "archaics". Until then, I had not seen one normal girl or
female of any age, and now there were a dozen at least, with the lake and
wheeling white birds as a background, and I could hear other female voices, and
some male, on the galleries of the surrounding buildings.
I
had stopped as soon as I entered. I had come so far only because we had been
closely attended by the guards, but now they had dropped back as though to give
the illusion of an area of freedom within what, from the outside, had
certainly looked a prison. I said to Selwyn who with Liebnitz had accompanied
me purposefully into the palatial interior:
"What is this
place?"
"The Eugenics Center of Center
City." He looked at me with slight amazement, as though he could not quite
get used to the idea that I did not know.
Eugenics Centre? I wondered. The girls had
all turned and were looking at me in a certain way, with a distinct and
surprised interest. I wondered what I had got myself into. I thought: Oh nol
But the more I thought, the more likely it seemed. The guarded palace
atmosphere reminded me un-mistakeably of a harem, of the women's apartments of
a Sultan's palace. My mind began to fill with wild ideas.
"Hold
itl" I said. "Just what goes on here?" By stopping I had forced
Liebnitz and Selwyn to rum back to me, and now they were looking at me as well
as all the girls, and I could see other heads appearing at the rails and walls
along the galleries.
"Don't imagine too much," Liebnitz
told me with that expression on his face that I had seen when we were coming
through the city, of cynicism and envy. "As an Oudander we certainly
aren't satisfied with you yet after what must be three or four generations of
breeding in the wilds. A severe physical examination will be necessary before
you get the run of this place."
The girls, after looking at me, and while
still looking at me with their intent and particular interest, had begun to
talk and giggle and whisper among themselves.
"The
question is, are you a true archaic?" Selwyn said. "You are rare
enough even in the city, where we have tried to maintain our primary breeding
stock. That you have survived in the old shape in the Outlands is remarkable
enough, but that alone doesn't entitle you to breeding herel"
They
meant it. I found it appalling. They implied that it was a privilege that they
had brought me there. They were looking at me impatiently, as though it were
the last thing that they expected, that I should hang back. But hang back from
what? I looked at the girls and tried to see what their eyes were saying. I
stood where I was, and since the guards had stopped at the inner entrance, I
would not move an inch.
"I don't get it!"
I said. "Eugenics? Breeding?"
Watching me, the girls
laughed.
"He
is more ignorant than we thought, as an Outlander," Liebnitz said.
"Archaic
children are rare," Selwyn said impatiently, with the air of explaining
something that should be wholly obvious to me. "While the radiation of
the Rift continues there are variations in every generation. Archaics get
fewer. Yet we need them to produce even the primary variations with which we
are experimenting. Even Liebnitz and I and our kind need archaics not two
generations back in our ancestry if we are to be reproduced. But true
archaics! Don't imagine you have a right to this even if our examination shows
you are yourself archaic. You must breed true on test to stay here. Otherwise,
like our helicopter pilot, you will be out!"
They
were threatening me, it seemed, with just that expulsion from the palatial
prison that I wanted. But not, apparently if I proved true-breeding. I tried
to imagine what they implied. "On test" they said. Did that imply
that I would have to wait nine months?
Another
thought came into my mind. He had mentioned the helicopter pilot, whom I knew,
though Selwyn did not, to be a revolutionary, a dissatisfied member of the community,
and probably an Antiquist, an upholder of that heresy or doctrine that I did
not understand but which they abhorred. He had said he would contact me, and I
had been hoping ultimately that he would help me to escape. But what Selwyn
said now cast a fight on that. If the pilot was dissatisfied because he had
once been in this place and rejected, if that was the kind of grounds on which
Anti-quism flourished and gained its revolutionary impetus, then I was in a
thorough net, in a closed circle, and I could feel the complications closing in
stiflingly all around me. I tried to break it.
"Listen!" I said. For a moment I
stood in the middle of their terrace with what must have seemed to them to be
stupid, bull-like obstinacy, and would not budge. "I've given up trying to
convince you, because you won't believe me. But this is the truth! I'm not an
archaic, an atavistic throwback to a previous generation as you seem to think.
I actually do come from an earlier time! And I don't understand this! I don't
understand what has happened to the world, or what its cause was, or what it
is. I don't fit into your way of life at all!" I looked at the entrance
where the guards were watching me, and then at the parapet, which I could see
was high above the lake. I had to escape then, and I knew I had, or I could see
myself incarcerated in that building for evermore.
I was scared two ways at once. One was that I
did not like their talk of radiation, or a Rift or Discontinuity, or whatever
they said it was. It was true I did not understand it, but i had seen its effects all around me in the
city. I was scared that every day, every hour I spent in that environment,
might affect me in some way so that if I ever did choose, after getting back to
my own time, voluntarily to become a father ...
I did not like to think of that.
"What
is it?" I said while the girls looked wide-eyed at me, pleased even I
thought, though at the same time giggling, to see me create a diversion in what
everyone seemed to regard -as almost sacred precincts. "What is your
world?" I said to Liebnitz who was shaking his head at me. "Are you
suffering from the aftermath of an atomic war?"
The
other thing I was scared of, of course, was that I would not be affected by the
radiation, that since I had been in it such a comparatively short time, they
would "prove me true-breeding" as they said and keep me there forever.
As what? As a kind of zoo creature on stud? It looked extraordinarily like it.
"I
don't think you realize your position, Outlander," Liebnitz told me
sharply. He seemed to be taking the attitude that by raising objections and not
cooperating with him and Selwyn I had somehow let him down. "When Selwyn
speaks of you being rejected here, that does not imply, in your case, that you
can be put to flying helicopters or working the electricity supply or doing any
of the things rejected archaics can do, in their capacity as ingenious
toolmakers, in the shape of useful work. You are an Outlander and so your very
survival, as other than an experimental animal, depends on my ability to
educate youl And for that, at the very least, I must have your cooperation. Would
you prefer to die?"
I thought of fighting then. I had thought
already of taking a run and leaping over the parapet. If it had been water
immediately below, even after a drop of fifty or sixty feet, I believe I would
have done it. But I could see the cliffs beyond the buildings. They seemed to
enclose a beach. And even if I survived the drop onto sand or rocks, and could
swim out into the lake, I knew that the city stretched away on both sides and I
would have to get through it to reach the country I would have to cross to get
back to the cave.
It
was hopeless, I realized. I could curse myself for not having escaped earlier
though I could not think when, but being where I was there was nothing but to
set myself to learn, to understand the situation I was in, then to use my
knowledge when I had it to engineer my escape by more subtle means.
"All right!" I said, and tried not
to show my hopelessness. "No more fantasies about having come from a past
time or Antiquist heresies?" Liebnitz said sharply. "No!"
"Good,"
said Selwyn. "Then we can proceed! We will give you a thorough medical
examination, and then if you still look like an orthodox archaic, and prove
healthy from the blood tests, we will consider using you in a day or two for a
trial breeding."
His
words produced a sound of excitement from the girls, a titter of laughter that
made me for the first time really look at them.
The
dozen on the terrace and on or by the parapet were of all ages from sixteen to
thirty. They were simply but colorfully dressed, and they had an air about
them, a
tendency to cling together
and exchange secrets as though they were an enclosed and protected sisterhood.
Yet they had not been shocked by the talk of breeding. It was the atmosphere of
the seraglio, of women so enclosed and sheltered that they saw themselves in a
single light and had but a single aim. And yet it struck me that they and I and
any others there might be like us, who were prisoners in that building, were
the last representatives of humanity as I had
known it. We were like creatures in a zoo, last products of an all but extinct
and dying species, yet kept obviously as things of value, for breeding
purposes, the nature of which Selwyn and Liebnitz had explained to me, but of
which they, not we, were masters.
"What room?" said
Selwyn to one of the entrance guards. It was the end one on the ground floor,
with access directly from the terrace.
XVI
"I being
the light," she said
after she had slipped diffidently into my room.
I looked at her. She was one of the younger
but not the youngest girls. She was about nineteen or twenty. She had come in
hurriedly and closed the door quickly behind her as though she had had
difficulty in getting away from the others and had been anxious that they
should not see her enter.
She
was carrying no lamp. She was carrying nothing at all in fact except herself
and her loose-flowing dress. I looked up at the electric light fitting in the
ceiling. Electricity, I had already seen, was one of the few concessions to
modernity that Center City made.
"If
that is meant to be a cryptic utterance," I said, "youTI have to
explain it to me. I'm not yet used to your city ways."
"Oh!"
she said. "I thought that even in the Outlands they'd know the greeting of
an Antiquist!"
I
looked at her again, more sharply now. So this was the terror, the peril, that
Selwyn and Liebnitz had been warning me against. It was hard to take it
seriously in the form of a slender and pretty girl. I had to tell myself that
we in our time were deeply concerned about Communist agents no matter how they
looked, but all I succeeded in doing was in making myself wonder if we were
right to take Communist agents so seriously either.
"You—are
an Antiquist?" I said. "Not so loudly!" she implored me.
"Come
and sit beside me," I said. There was a shortage of wood in Center City.
The room had stone couches with upholstery and cushioning.
She
came diffidently. "People are liable to misinterpret when two are together
on a couch in a place like this," she said. "Besides, you haven't
been passed yet."
I
thought wildly for a moment of asking her what her attitude would be if I had
been. She made it sound as though my being passed would be equivalent to our
being married. I decided to by-pass it, my position there being bad enough
already. I would meet that situation when the time came.
"We
know better," I said. "Tell me all about Antiquism."
She
lifted her big blue eyes and looked at me with amazement. "Don't you
know?" she said. "I thought all Outlanders were natural Antiquists
and you had families and—" She blushed. "That kind of thing."
I
could see I was in a position of delicacy. If I were passed as medically fit by
Liebnitz and Selwyn then anything went between me and her, but when she talked
of families she blushed. I was going to have to walk a tightrope not to appear
a moral boor.
"What
do I call you?" I said.
"Irimia."
"Listen,
Irimia, all that you were talking about, families and all that, seems natural
to me. What I don't know is the doctrine of Antiquism and how it affects Selwyn
and Liebnitz and the authorities in this city."
She
looked at me with big eyes.
"Oh,
I don't know that I can tell you that. I was just told to contact you through
the channels of our organization, when we heard you were in here."
"Try,"
I said.
"You know about Selwyn and Liebnitz and
their hybrid people?" she said. "Their what?"
"Hybrids,"
she said. "We call them hybrids. You know
what
they say about using the radiation period of the Rift, and the way all children
are different from their parents now, to evolve a new kind of man? It isn't
true. They don't want to invent anything new at all. It's only themselves they
want to produce, and that's why we archaics are kept here, because we are the
first kind from which they are evolved."
I
sat quietly looking at her. It might be true. It tied up with what Selwyn
himself had told me in one way. But it might be scurrilous gossip. The fact
that she innocently believed it made no difference.
"They
seemed sincere when they told me they were trying to evolve a new kind of
man," I said. I remembered it: "A higher man dedicated to peace and a
higher consciousness or something. It would only be a more savage and warlike
man that would be evolved by competition and survival of the fittest in the
wild."
She looked amazed that I
had believed so much.
"Oh,
they are sincerel" she said. "Naturally, they think they are the
higher kind of man. All lands do. That is what Antiquism teaches. The hybrids
think they are a higher land of man because they have an intellectual capacity
beyond the rest of us. Only they are—well, hybrids. They have to get over
that."
"I only know about
flowers being hybrids," I said.
She
evidently found it difficult to teach an ignorant Out-lander even the most
simple facts of life.
"Have you ever seen a hybrid
woman?" she said. "A woman like Selwyn and Liebnitz? They are the
same. Their bodies .. . and have you
ever seen a hybrid baby? Most babies have big heads, but they—it doesn't
work."
"How are they
born?"
"From
two different kinds. From the big squat women and a different land of men. It's
very complicated. It's something to do with recessive genes. And the kind of
men they need are only born from us archaics. So they aren't a race, you see,
Selwyn and Liebnitz and their kind. They were only produced in the early stages
of the Rift by accident, by crossing. They think they're better than all of
us, but they can't arrange for their continuance because the kind of men who
are their fathers aren't true-breeding either. It's a difficult problem for
them. But that's what they mean by evolving a higher kind of man. They will
solve it when they find some way of bringing men like themselves into being
regularly, by their social breeding laws, and not just by accident, from time
to time."
She
was looking at me innocently. She hadn't blushed when she told me the
anatomical and genetic details, and, complicated as the story was, I did not
think she could have invented it.
"So this is
Antiquism," I said slowly. "The dreadful crime.''
"Oh
no!" She looked at me pleadingly and passionately. "Antiquism is much
more than that! There's more, much more—I've told it very badly!"
"More?" I looked
at her suspiciously. "Such as what?"
"Antiquism
is about evolution. It says all creatures must fight against their own
successors if they're really new and different."
I stared at her.
"Oh, the hybrids are right about some
things!" she said, "It's awful, but what they say about us is true.
We are just toolmakers. We're animals that because of what we are have an urge
to make and do. Liebnitz will tell you! He'll point out that archaic
science—the science our ancestors had when they had a big material
civilization—was really just a list
of ways of doing things. And it's true! We can't get past it Look at any of our
old scientific text books. All the theorizing, all the deep thinking about
what things are, and why, just disappears after a year or two. New things used
to be found out that made it nonsense. But the instructions for doing things,
oh, experiments and ways of making things, they remained! That was our kind of
mind. And that is why we hate the hybrids, who haven't got that kind of mind.
They aren't interested in doing and making material things for their own sake.
Surely you must see that!"
I did. One view of Center
City had taught me that the hybrids had no mechanical sense at all. Yet I felt
dazed, wondering what the girl was trying to tell me.
"But
that doesn't mean you must hate theml That doesn't mean that they can't make a
New Manl"
She stared at me,
despairing at what she had to explain.
"It
doesl Don't you see that if we were
inventing our own successors we would not have aimed at anything like the
hybrids! We'd have aimed at a New Man more like us, better able to make and
do, because those are our aims! Something big and beautiful, like us
but more so. But the same applies to the hybrids! It's a law of nature that
they too must think of the New Man as being like them—because he would have to
be like them to have their
aims! So they would never
produce any really new creature voluntarily. No living creature would! Would
the reptiles have voluntarily produced the mammals? They would have hated
them! So living creatures can't take the destiny of their species in their own
hands. Nature and evolution have forces in them that are beyond our
understanding. Free breeding and survival of the fittest are the only way.
Antiquism sees the need for the free operation of the laws of nature!"
For
an instant, I was not only dazed but dazzled. It was rightly called Antiquism,
this doctrine, I thought. Our eyes met, and, remembering the basis for our
fight for freedom in the past, I said:
"Irimia! So what you really believe—it
isn't as new as you think, all this—do you believe in God?"
She
was looking at me wide-eyed, but her mouth fell open. She looked pained and
lost.
"What is 'God'?" she said.
I stared back at her as we sat on the stone
couch in the precarious quiet of the room. I felt a sense of loss and anguish.
For a moment I had been hoping—for what? For a meeting of minds across a
century? That she would know what she was doing in restating our old doctrine
in her new form? It was too much to hope.
"All right, Irimia," I said
heavily. "What do we do about it?" I could not say more.
Her
expression became pleading again. "You must help us," she said. I
said slowly, "I must help you?"
"You
are a power in the Outlands, aren't you?" She was looking at me with a
slight amazement.
It
was true I had told the helicopter pilot that. I had done it to give him an
interest in me, he and any forces that might help to get me out of the net in
which I found myself. And it had worked. The girl would not have been with me
now if I had not said that. But I had not expected them—her—to put so much
faith in me.
"You are a leader," she said,
suddenly looking at me and believing it. "You are a leader of noble
savagesl And look at you, a true archaic! You are a vindication of our
theories. You give us hope our species will survive. And so you must help us!
You must help us to bring back to the city in this period of the Rift the
freedom you practice in the Outlands! You must help us to seize the city! You
must! Otherwise, the hybrids will make their war on you. They will organize their
army of the lesser breeds to conquer you. For your own sake—our objects are the
same—you must, must help us!"
She
was carried away. And were our objects the same? Mine was—and had to be—to get
back to my own time. And yet for the immediate move they were.
"Irimia,
don't you see? First I must get out of here!" I began to feel a traitor.
"But
you—We thought that you would find a way!"
I
could only gasp at the extent of their faith.
"Tell
me. Has anyone escaped from this Eugenics Center ever? Irimia, do you know
how?"
She
thought, amazed.
"There
was a girl once. She had a lover. A man on the lake. He brought a boat. They
escaped, we think. They escaped into the Outlands!"
"Good,"
I said. "Now tell this to your people. I can't do anything for them while
I'm in here. They must get me out. To do that, they must have a boat lying off
shore for me here at midnight. It must lie a hundred yards off, darkened, and
it must be there at midnight."
"Not
tonightl" she said. "You must give them time. And do you think it is
easy for us to pass messages in and out of this place?"
"Tonight!"
I said firmly, thinking how even that meant that the sphere would have to come
to the cave again, and go back empty once more before I could reach it. I could
not guess how often they would continue to send it with no result. "And
another thing. They must arrange to get me back to the Outlands, not just
anywhere, but to the place from which I started."
She
did not look hopeful. Perhaps she knew her own organization, I thought. They
were much talked about in Center City, but they were about as effective, I
thought, and with as much chance of success, as the Communists in the U.S.A.
A
bell began to ring somewhere in the building. She got up at once.
"I
must go!" she said. "We are to assemble. I will be missed!"
"You will arrange that?"
"I'll
get the message out." She looked at me as though I were asking for the
moon. "I can't promise. You don't know what
difficulties we have. The hybrids are so very clever!" She was almost
running to the door.
"Irimia!"
I stopped her. She turned to look at me, scared now, for just a moment. Her
expression was that of a nun who feared that she was about to be caught in
mortal sin.
"Do you want to escape
with me tonight?" I said.
"Oh
no!" She was shocked by the idea. "It is my duty," she said
virtuously. "I must stay here!"
Then
she was away, slipping out through my door with a youngly determined expression of sincerity and innocence.
XVII
I was
not to know Liebnitz
would tantalize me so much without telling me anything.
I
had to know. If there were any prospect of my getting back to my own time at
all, it was the drive and purpose of my life to get to know. I went to the
window of my room and parted the hangings that had been drawn earlier against
the glare of the sunlight from the lake. The sun had moved to the west now and
the glare was less. I looked out and wondered how I was going to get out that
night There were no bars across the window, and it opened, but there was a
sixty foot drop onto rocks below. Someone had thought that that was sufficient,
and I believed that they were right. I looked at the hangings and the covers on
the bed, and saw that they were not enough. There was a patch of sand below the
building, but that was right below the terrace. I withdrew from the window
quickly, hearing steps outside the door.
One
of the big-bodied pin-headed men entered. He was bringing food.
"What happened to the world?" I
asked him. "What caused the radiation? What is the Rift?"
He put the food down on the stone-topped
table. "You eat alone. You are not allowed to mix until your tests are
done," he said. He had a high, squeaky voice. He was the kind of guard
they would have, I thought, in a place like that "Stay in your room,"
he said.
I wondered why they used the words
"rift" and "discontinuity" to describe a process of
genetic variation and mutation that we had only envisaged as being possible,
along with a high incidence of cancer and vast infant mortality, as an outcome
of an atomic war. I ate the food and waited.
The man came to take the stoneware plates
out. Later, Hiebnitz came in. This was it.
He
settled himself in one of my chairs and opened a formidable notebook, his small
features in his big head frowning as he made a heading and drew a line.
"You will thank me sooner or later for the interest I am taking in your
case," he said, "when we have made a useful citizen of you and you
are allowed a certain amount of freedom."
I
walked across the room and turned back to look at him. "Suppose you
don't?" I said. "Suppose all you can get out of me is what you can
expect from an Outlander and an Antiquist: the maximum amount of
non-cooperation?"
He
looked at me mildly, and if not benignly at least with a professional lack of
antipathy.
"That will make absolutely no difference
to your usefulness to us," he said. "It will only disappoint me and
prove my methods useless and result in the utmost inconvenience and discomfort
for you."
I looked at him grimly. He was too confident
and self-satisfied for my purpose. "Have you ever heard the saying you can
take a horse to water but you can't make it drink? You have me here for
breeding. But suppose I just refuse?"
"We will get over
that."
"But how?"
"There
are drugs we can use. They are not very good for the mind, but we are not
concerned with that. Damage to the mind does not affect the genes. And then
there are techniques of artificial insemination. We often have cause to use
them."
They would, I thought. I went back to sit on
the couch. I watched him writing in his notebook. I could even guess what it
was: "Subject antagonistic and non-cooperative."
"Why
are you so much against archaics?" I said. "Why do you hate us?"
I had made an impression. He looked up
shocked.
"That
is nonsense! Are we not doing everything possible, often against your own
wishes, to maintain your species?"
"Only to re-create
yourselves," I said.
He looked at me narrowly. "So you are a
sophisticated Antiquist? You know the latest scandal!"
I saw he did not write it
in his notebook.
"What is it?" I said. "Envy,
because we are true-breeding?"
I
was getting through. His face twisted. There was something there. It had been a
guess on my part.
"You!"
he said. "You with your limited mechanical minds, your materialism, your
constant making and destroying. Do you think anyone can envy you when the world
would not be in the state it is if it were not for you?"
"We?"
I said. I was there. It was the vital information and he was going to give it
to me.
"You!"
He had an expression of malice now. "You and the wretched, busy,
materialist civilization you set up. They were like you, your ancestors. You
are just the same today. You want to do something. You don't tliink why.
Endless doing for no objective. Do you know what your ancestors were like? They
had an endless transport system that stretched around the globe. And they had
no need for it. They had wealth and they had ability and they were living in a
vast unexploited country. They above everyone had no need to do anything, no
need to get away!"
I wondered if it were his idea of educating
me and whether he hoped to win me to him. I said, "What did we do?"
He
was as clever as Irimia said. He realized almost instantly that if his aim was
to win me he had taken the wrong line with me. But I did not know it.
"But it was not your fault," he
said coldly. "We understand that. You were not to know that the
specialization that had enabled you to build up your industrial civilization
would destroy you. Perhaps no one did. Even we might not have known it if we
had not your example. That is why we use no more knowledge than can be
contained in one human mind today."
I felt it slipping away again. He had been
about to tell me, and then he had not done so. I had thought it would come
easily, and instead I had to fight.
"I don't believe you," I said.
"Those are abstractions, generalities. If you want to convince me you'll
have to prove it and tell me just what happened."
He
gave me a knowing grin. "You know well enough," he said. "You
know what I mean by specialization. Every man knowing his own work, his own
subject, and not that of any others. Trust that everything would work out for
the best when your sciences even used different languagesl You realize that a
man trained in social psychology could not even understand the words in a book
of bio-chemstry?"
I kept hammering away. I looked at him
scornfully, "What was it then?"
"Worse
than that," he said. "And this you probably don't know. Your
ancestors were reasonable in that. So long as they trusted the men who were
trained in various subjects they had no reason then to know that mistakes could
be made. They didn't know that a community of isolated specialists is like a
man with a split mind. But they aggravated the situation. They had something
called Security. It wasn't only that scientists working in different subjects
could not criticize one another's work or see how it was beginning to affect
their own. They were not allowed to do so. Can you understand that? The
insanity of it? Only an archaic mind could conceive of it. They had specialists
in Security whose business it was to prevent some scientists knowing what others
did."
I had a sinking feeling. It was a distorted
picture of our world he was giving me, but it was recognizable. Yet I thought
not only of the people and the social system of Center City but the mountain
chains, the changes in climate and geography. It was that above all. I had to
know how it had come about. I thought I could know.
"And so you say we
caused it?"
He
looked calmly at me now. I did not know how it affected what he was telling me
but he had recovered from the anger into which I had thrown him. He even smiled
thinly, as though with pity for my ignorance, to show me maybe how if I
listened to him and believed him he could set me on the right track.
"Listen,"
he said. "Let me give you an example. The state of knowledge as it was in
your world a hundred years ago: in the world of your ancestors, when the
archaic civilization flourished. The earth is hot inside. You know that? So did
your ancestors. They said it had been hot once, like the sun, and was cooling
down. That explanation satisfied nine tenths of your population. Why not? It
was not their subject. They accepted the simple, facile explanation. It was
your people's way. What matter that the earth had been as it was, demonstrably,
for a hundred million years? They were busy. They were making things. It was
not then-business to think how long it would have taken a hot body to cool down
in the cold of space. They even knew there were volcanoes. It was an effect of
the hotness. It was not their business to wonder why. A plumber was a plumber,
not a seismologist. A baker was a baker, not a geophysicist. That was the level
of understanding of your population as a whole. A single skill satisfied them.
It more than satisfied them. If they knew something about one thing it excused
them for inability to think, and crass ignorance in every other branch
whatsoever. You had not even curiosity, you archajcs, except of a rudimentary
land when children. It was not only that you knew nothing of the world you
lived on. The vast majority of you did not even want to know."
Despite
myself, I found myself becoming involved in his criticism. I was trying to use
him, to turn his efforts to "educate" me into telling me just what I
wanted to know. Instead, I found myself wanting to defend my world, to fend off
his sharp criticism that he thought was directed against my ancestors, the
original archaics, and that to me seemed directed against myself, Sara,
Galbraith, the General, and everyone I knew.
'. "Why not?" I said. "Why
shouldn't we archaics have taken that attitude? What was the use of the man in
the street knowing in detail about the construction of the world?
He
couldn't do anything about it. What use is any knowledge about things you
can't affect or alter in any way?"
He
looked coldly at me. I do not know if I have mentioned the quality of Liebnitz'
eyes. They seemed to look into me and through me and make me shrivel.
"Isn't
that it?" he said. "The archaic attitude to knowledge, even in you?
Nothing is of use to you unless it enables you to do something. Like a child
out of your own lips you condemn yourself."
"What
good was it? What good would it have been if they had known everything there
was to know about the interior and construction of the earth?"
I thought of those mountain chains even as I
asked my questions.
"They were voters?" he said.
"You have heard of their governmental system, a democracy? Can you
conceive of anything worse, an elite of knowledge without power, and an
electorate priding themselves on their stupidity and ignorance? But even those
of your people who did know facts about the world knew them separately, in
isolation, as separate facts, that, because of the division of the sciences,
were never put together! The knowledge was there, you see! It was known, by the
geophysicists, that the heat of the earth was engendered by atomic forces. The
specialists in earthquakes knew that they were engendered by the heating of
radioactive minerals in the lower rocks. The specialists even knew the causes
of volcanoes. But there was no one to put all this knowledge together and
describe the earth as that nearly living thing, an active atomic pile. And as
for the paleontologists and specialists in organic evolution putting their
knowledge together, and working with the geologists, to see the whole quite
clearly, such things were never done! What good would it do? How many dollars
would it have earned? How many ships would it have launched? What enemies would
it have conquered?"
He taunted me.
"We had scientific symposims!" I
said. "All right! Then tell me: what happened; what did we do?"
His
small face looked at me with a bleak intelligence. "You don't know?"
he said. "You want to know the details? I must remember that. It is the
most crucial thing for a teacher to find out, to discover in his pupil, a
specific lack of knowledge that he knows he has. It will do as a peg on which
to hang my later lectures to you."
I
realized suddenly that he had been playing with me. From the moment I had made
him angry and set out to use him he had understood my objectives. He was
intelligent. Irimia had been right. He had had no reason to believe that I was
trying to discover something, and yet he had sensed it, working solely on what
I said. And he had done what he wished to do. He had used my desires to fill my
mind with all lands of useless knowledge that I did not want while he had kept
back the main fact. It was with a sense of being hopelessly outwitted by him,
of being in greater danger in that Eugenics Center, of mind and soul than I had
ever been of body, that I said,
"So
you know what I want to know and you aren't going to tell me?"
He smiled and wrote something in his
notebook, then closed it and got up and went towards the door. He turned back
calmly and looked at me.
"I'll
tell you this," he said. "I'll tell you what your people did not
understand. They knew, some of them, that the world was, in one sense, an
atomic pile. They knew it was a slower-burning source of solar energy than the
sun. And others of them knew that fife evolving on the earth had progressed
not steadily, in a straight-line pattern of evolution, but by leaps and bounds.
The cartiligious fish had progressed steadily for half a million years, then
suddenly, after a rift in the rocks that could have denoted some kind of
volcanic action, their fossils are accompanied by the true-boned fish. A Rift:
you understand? A Discontinuity, such as that which obscured the fossil record
of just how the fish came out and populated the land as reptiles. A volcanic
period, such as marked the great changes in the landscape when the reptiles
gave place to mammals. Changes of climate, such as accompanied the ice-ages
that marked the appearance of true prehistoric man. And such volcanic periods
could only have been caused by special radioactivity within the earth. And
evolution, variation and mutation, is caused primarily by radiation that
damages or affects the genes in reproducing cells. Now do you understand the
answer? Do you know what it was our ancestors did?"
His
small and wizened-looking face looked at me mockingly. He knew I could not
guess, but he turned towards the door.
XVIII
I stood
looking out
of the window in the moonlit darkness onto the sixty foot drop to the rocks
below. I knew I had to go. It was just because Liebnitz knew what I wanted to
know now that it was no use my staying.
I could not see a boat out there on the lake
in the darkness. But if there were one, or if I could get in touch with the
Ann'quists outside the Eugenics Center, it would be better to ask them, or
anyone, than to let Liebnitz brain-wash me while he tantalized me with my lack
of knowledge.
There
were so many things I wished to know. I wished I knew how the city, the
Community, had started. A place that had been spared, I wondered, in the vast
cataclysm that had destroyed the rest of civilization on the earth? Or the
people in some survival-shelter, digging themselves out after what they too
might have thought was some episode in World War 3, after days or perhaps weeks
of effort, to find themselves in a world that had changed around them?
I
would like to have heard the history, the slow dawning knowledge, the awareness
of the radiation, the realization of what was happening first with the sight of
insects and the lower animals, and then the birth of the first human children.
What had they done, decided to kill all non-human children? Had the couples who
had produced such monsters promptly parted, and remarried or gone to five with
someone else of the other sex until it was proved which of them had suffered
some genetic damage? There would have been no sure way to tell, except by the
event, in a community struggling for survival in a barren, earthquake-ridden
and rock-strewn world. Savage mating laws must have been instituted at an early
date, of necessity, in a way that cut right across the rights of marriage.
Racial envy and racial hatred must have turned to species envy and species
hatred as, maybe in a generation or two, new species grew up and their Unes crossed and parted. Liebnitz was right in one way. I shuddered to think
what must be happening in a state of sheer survival of the fittest, in the
Outlands, in the wild.
Yet
if I wanted to know any of these things it would be better to ask anyone, even
a total stranger, rather than someone in the Eugenics Center now that Liebnitz
had satisfied himself about my specific lack of knowledge. I left the window
and went to my door and listened. I had already put the light out and left my
room in darkness.
The
buildings were quiet. Outside, across the terrace and seemingly from above, I
could hear faint male and female voices, and a burst of laughter. I tried to
imagine what it was like to five always in such a place, with no interest but
breeding and genetics and a series of regulated loves to order. Such was the
fate of the last of humanity, I thought, the last of humankind. I went back to
the window and took down the hanging curtains. It was half an hour to midnight,
and I knotted them together and began to strip the bed.
When
I had finished, I went to the window and sat silently on the ledge for a little
while. I had my improvised rope with me, and I fastened it to my middle. I
lowered myself from the window, and with my toes I found a ledge.
It was the way I had decided to get out. It
was the only way. Hanging over the sixty foot drop outside the building I
thought for a moment and then began to work my way along the ledge, hands flat
against the dark wall, towards the terrace.
There
was only one advantage in working towards the terrace parapet outside the
building instead of opening my room door and walking to it. It was that this
way I would not be seen. But that was vital.
I
wished I were in that dim-witted, euphoric happy state I had been in when I had
climbed out of the cave and down the cliff. Then, I had been careless of
heights. Now my palms were sweating as I pressed them against the wall with the
gentlest pressure. If I were forced outwards even a fraction of an inch I would
fall over backwards into the drop.
When
I had worked along to the parapet of the terrace, I had another thing to do. I
dare not emerge around the corner of the building against the sky. The terrace
was watched as I had already discovered. I had to take one foot off the ledge,
and, with no hand-hold, slowly bend the other leg. With my free toe balancing
me by its touch on the wall below, I had to lower my body below the level of
the parapet.
The guards were on the other side in the
darkness. I had to trust that they would not see my finger tips as I took hold
of the lip of the parapet and eased myself along.
I
made my rope fast to one of the ornamental pillars that were cut into the wall.
I began to lower myself down it. Below me, I could see a lighter area that I
hoped was sand.
It
had to be. The bottom of my rope left me hanging between twenty and thirty
feet above the ground. I could not have gone back if I had tried. I felt that
the improvised rope was giving. I let go and fell through the air. Going down,
I thought that the one place the parachute landings I had practised were
difficult was up against a wall. Only a cat can make a perfectly controlled
landing in that situation ufter a drop of thirty feet.
I
lay in the dark shadow under the wall on the sand on which I had landed with a
thud. I waited for sounds on the terrace above me. When they did not come, I
stretched my limbs.
I was whole. My left ankle was distinctly
painful. Only time would tell if it would get better or worse. When I first
tried my weight on it, it gave me a stab of pain. I looked out to seawards
across the lake.
I could see no boat. I had placed too much
reliance on Irimia and the Antiquists.
I
went cautiously down towards the water and worked along the beach. My ankle was
no more painful than it was to begin with, but I dared not trust it on the
rocks. When I came to where the only other way of progress was to climb and
attempt to cross or scale a cliff, I took to the water, waded in, and began to
swim.
The
black water was slightly salt, and cold. It was better for my ankle. I would
need it, I thought, for walking later. I swam out to begin with, and then along
in the dark shadow of the cliff. The rocks looked smooth and unclimbable and
after a hundred yards I began to wonder how far I would have to go to the first
landing in the city.
I
was weakening, swimming in shoes and clothes, when I heard a soft voice sounding
over the water behind me.
"Where do you think
you're going, Outlander?"
The
bow of a boat slid up beside me with the soft trickling sound of backed oars,
cutting off my view across the lake. A hand came down to help me into it.
"It's
as well you decided to swim this way," the voice said. "If you'd gone
the other, I'd never have been able to find you in the darkness."
XIX
I was streaming water as I sat in the boat which he allowed
to drift in the night on the placid water. He did not say anything at first,
just sitting quietly and looking at me as he held his oars as though to see
what kind of fish he had caught.
"Who
are you?" I said. I thought he would take me somewhere, but he was in no
hurry. A boat on the lake was as good a place to talk as any.
"Call me Smith."
His
voice was sardonic. It had a different tone from that of the helicopter pilot.
It was the voice of a man who contended with difficulties but who believed he
knew what he was doing.
"A good name for an archaic," I
said.
"You
think you could just swim to a landing and walk through the city in wet
clothes?" he said.
"I've got to get back to the
Outlands."
He took a pull with the oars and let the boat
drift again.
"You're a leader of the
Antiquists?" I said.
He laughed grimly.
"You didn't give us much time."
"Maybe
you can tell me something. In the place I've just come from they've been
feeding me a lot of stuff about how we archaics are responsible for the state of the world as it is today. You can tell me about it."
"We made our mistakes
in the past."
"What did we dor
"At
least we always did things on the grand scale," he said. I sat quiet. He
was not keen to pursue what to him was an academic question. I had made a
mistake to mention it. "So you claim you can deliver the goods," he
said. "Give you support from the Outlands? Maybe."
He leant forward on his oars. "You
realize we'll all be killed if things go wrong?" he said. "They don't
need us, the males. A lot of us, who produce children of the old normal archaic
human pattern are tolerated and given mechanical and engineering jobs around
the city. But they don't really need us for that. They don't want us for
breeding. They only want the few who produce the particular mutant types they
want for their kind. We start a revolt that fails and it won't be toleration;
it'll be extermination."
"They need to keep you for one reason. They need to
keep the old archaic stock going." j
"They
have enough of us, the only part they want of us,' in laboratory cold storage,
to last a generation."
I
had heard about artificial insemination techniques. I was afraid that he was
right. Even in our time it was common to keep animal semen in cold storage for
a year or two and it had been said on good authority that if ever it was
necessary to keep human semen for a generation or two, as in the', case of
atomic war, it could be done.
His
voice rose a little, not loudly but becoming harder, "This is survival of
the fittest," he said. "This is the last chance of our particular
species. Unless we can get our women out, and set up a colony of us to breed
normally again, as a species we are doomed. Only survival isn't fought out in
the jungle here. It is fought in all the treachery and complexity of city
politics. And it is fought on a world scale. Whoever dominates this city now
must dominate the earth in a few years time. You Outlanders won't stand a
chance."
He let the boat drift in the night. He was
waiting for me to speak. I had to think what it was he wanted me to say.
"All right. What is it you want me to do?" "That's better,"
he said.
But
he gave only one pull to the oars and let the boat drift again.
"You
can't expect miracles from me," I said. "You said yourself we
Outlanders wouldn't stand a chance." I was troubled because I did not
truly know the conditions in the Outlands.
He
had spoken of treachery. He had told me, and I believed him, that he was
fighting for the survival of what I regarded as the human species. And all I
was trying to do with him was to get him to use his organization to deliver me
to some point on the fringe of the Oudands from which I could get back to the
cave.
He
was not a mind-reader. He sat in the darkness resting forward on his oars and
he believed I was being honest now.
"You
Outlanders," he said. "You fight guerilla warfare. When a column from
the city enters your territory, you retreat before it. You've got into the
habit of thinking it will withdraw and waiting for it to do that. This time,
you can't afford to do it. The city is ready to make a move. It won't be a
punitive expedition they'll send against you. The intention will be to occupy,
to rule, to govern. And you are going to have to fight a battle against them.
You must pin them down."
It
was difficult for me, drifting in a boat on the dark lake, bargaining with him
about a situation, a people that I did not even know. Before, I had tried to
convince everyone that I was not an Outlander. Now I had to keep him thinking I
was an Outlander if I hoped to get back to the cave in time at all.
I
said, "I don't know that we have the strength to do that. We will lose
that battle."
"You must be prepared to lose the
battle. You must hold out long enough to get the city to send out its reserves.
Then, with the city forces committed outside, we strike from inside and take
the city. It's your only hope for survival in the long run."
He waited then. He had put his cards on the
table. In the dim light I could barely see him, but I knew there was something
about the man who called himself Smith. His was the way men always had worked,
with courage and intelligence and determination, for sheer survival. The
difference was that, in a world that had turned alien, he was fighting for the
survival of his species as a whole.
It was my species too, yet I was only
concerned to get him to transport me back to the cave.
"Or haven't you the guts and power to do
it?" He said. "Don't you think you can whip up your miscreant
Out-landers to fighting a single battle?"
I
took a risk. I wanted to tell him that I was not an Out-lander, that all I
wanted to do was to get off that lake, to get back to the cave, to get back to
my own time that was situated comfortably in the past. I could not do that. Too
much in my own time hung on it. I thought of Sara's skeleton. I had to get
back. Yet I tried to tell him that he should not depend too much on me.
I said, "They aren't all archaics—the
Outlanders. You
know what they are. I am a rarity. Why should they die
for you?" /
I wondered if I had gone too far, if I had
convinced him that I could be of no use to him. if that happened, I knew, he
would have no further purpose in helping me. A man in his position could not
take risks that in no way helped his purpose.
"It's
still the same," he said. "It won't be the archaics they will be
fighting for, but for their liberty."
He
had the answer, but with it he almost offered himself to me. He was so anxious
for what he believed I had to offer that he made himself clay in my hands, and
all his cause.
I only had to say the word to get him to use
his organization to smuggle me out of the city and transport me, in some
fashion I could not guess, back across the plain to the fringe of the Outlands
from which I could reach the cave.
I said it.
"Agreed,"
I said. "I can't promise anything. But I'll do my best."
He let go of one oar. He put out a hand to
take mine in the darkness. It was a survival, I guessed, of an ancient custom.
I had not seen Selwyn or Liebnitz use it. It must have survived exclusively
among archaics. But what it made me feel like when he did it is something I
would rather not say.
XX
I lay
in a crate under a bale of straw in the back of a farm
cart. We were jolting and bumping endlessly along a straight and dusty road. By
putting my hand through a slit in the crate and parting the straw I got a
narrow glimpse of dusty earth, the roadside, and occasional low farm buildings
set back and isolated in the plain. Sometimes, when the road passed near a
stream, there was a patch of green.
I had been in there for a
long time.
I had slept a little. At least we were out of
the city. Smith had been as good as his word, hiding me in the cart in a
lakeside warehouse before the dawn. Now, all my life, I seemed to have been
crossing that plain in a formidable, slow progression.
I tried not to think of
Smith.
Irimia.
She was another one. She had accepted her life, her fate in the Eugenics
Center. Perhaps all the women did, accepting what was common and usual for
them in their place and time. Morality was the custom of the community, of the
tribe, and morality and tribal customs bore harder on the women than they did
on men. But she had not quite accepted it. She had passed messages to and fro
and had come to me. Some people might say it was the highest brand of ethics,
to obey those customs and social habits that were the will of the community
while trying all the same to change them.
We
had made a mistake, we archaics, we representatives of the primary human stock
that had since expanded into many branches. I still did not know what that
mistake was, or how in the midst of our great material civilization we had destroyed
our world. I could only hope that we could piece it together, like parts from a
puzzle, from what I already knew, if I got back. Yet we had had virtues too, I
thought as I lay there in the jolting crate. We were not very logical, perhaps
not even very clever, but we had courage and something else, a word we used:
humanity.
I turned stiffly and moved my aching limbs on
the thin layer of straw that separated me from the slats of the crate in which
I lay. I looked out again and saw the same endless ■; scene, the
desolation, the rocky and arid dust-bowl which' we had made of our world. How?
By some means, I now : believed, other than atomic war.
Irimia
and her kind would perish too. They would live their lives out in the Eugenics
Center, producing monsters. Maybe there would even be others who would succeed
them, another generation of women living there and a few carefully nutured
males. But Smith was right. It was a zoo existence, comparable only with the
lives of those all but extinct and exterminated animals that were preserved as
curiosities and for possible ultimate scientific use in our own zoos. Once the
rest of the species, the men like Smith, and any Outlanders there might be who
were still archaics had ceased to exist in the wild, the species as such was
doomed. It was like the pterodactyl, like the Brontosaurus. Men, or some
man-like creatures in the future, might speculate as to what we were like, and
what we thought, and how we lived, but it would be a matter of conjectured
history only, and there could never be a come-back.
Yet
I had to get back. to the cave. I thought about it almost continuously in the
crate. I had to get back. I should never have left the cave in the first place.
I had been mad, deranged, to disobey my orders. My duty was to my own time, to
my country, to the army, to the General.
My
country right or wrong, I thought as the front wheel of the cart hit a pot-hole
and then the back went into it. It was, it always had been, with us, a matter
of allegiance to a country, and never to the species.
Perhaps
that was it, I thought in the heat and choking dust that filled the crate. My
mind filled with our old slogans, so seemingly irrelevant now in the country
and the century through which I was passing as a conspirator, as a spy. My
country right or wrong. And: Better dead than Red. Maybe we should have thought
more about what that implied and where we would have been if our distant ancestors
had always decided to die before they allowed themselves to lose a battle.
Suicide pacts were great, but they did not build nations.
Yet
no one had told me exactly what we had done. It might have nothing to do with
war. And there was that, too. I had seen and discovered more than anyone could
possibly have expected, but I was going back without the vital thing.
I
went into a kind of coma in the crate. I lay there all that day, in the heat
under the bale of straw as the cart maintained its creaking progression across
the arid countryside. I did not even know who was driving it. I slept again.
I
was roused by the realization that the cart had stopped. Someone was clattering
on the box and getting down. The straw began to shift over me. The top of the
crate lifted and the face of one of the squat women was looking down.
"Ye
c'n get out now," she said. "My farm 's over there. You can stay the
night."
I
sat up. For a moment I did not know where I was. There were hills ahead nearby
in the direction the cart was pointing. From the position of the sun it was
after the middle of the afternoon.
I
got out. I hardly looked in the direction of the woman's farm. I hardly thanked
her. I began to run.
I
was at the foot of the valley. I ran along the dusty road for a little way,
then left it when I saw a farm ahead. I went
toiling up a long dry slope to cut the comer of the valley and avoid the farms.
I was running across country, running from cover to cover and avoiding people.
When I looked back, I could see the cart still stopped below me and the woman
staring. But I had to get back to the cave. I thought of nothing else but that.
I had to run across the barren hillsides, and I had only just barely time.
If
they had kept to their regular schedule of sending the sphere, it would be
there, in the cave, until just after nightfall. At one moment I believed that I
could get to the head of the valley and the cave by nightfall, and the next I
believed I couldn't. But I had to try. I was not thinking now. All my energies
were devoted to forcing my body over that arid waste of countryside.
I
could see people sometimes in the fields and farms below me. When I entered
the valley, I still kept up the hillside. I hoped they would not see me. If
they had, I do not think it would have made any difference. I was getting back
to the cave. If I arrived as late as I expected, I would only need a little
time there.
Far
up the valley, I stopped. I was looking down on Jeb's and Molly's farm. I began
to think again then, a little. I thought: my flying suit. I would have to go
down to get it. I started down the valley side, coming down to the stream
beyond their isolated farm, the last before the valley head. I searched for a
short while desperately. I had it in my mind that I needed that flying suit to
survive the journey back. Then I found it. I snatched it up and stared off
again, heading for the rocks this time, the gulley, and the cave.
I
stopped on the ledge outside the cave. I had a precarious stance and I had only
a short distance to go to enter the cave itself and see if the sphere was
there, but I looked down on the peaceful valley. No one seemed to have seen me,
or, if they had, they had not troubled to chase me. I was going to say good-bye
to it, I thought. If the sphere was there, in the cave, I knew I would get into
it, glad to be back in its familiar reality whatever the transfer back entailed.
But why was I stopping then? Why was I reluctant to take that single look into
the cave that, if the sphere were there, would make my future actions
uncontrollable, make the desire I felt to get back to my own time beyond all
bearing?
I found I was turning,
still balancing on the narrow ledge.
I began to edge back along
it, back towards the gulley.
I
was in the gulley again and I looked along it on and upwards. I could see only
the ridge of the hill up there, and barren rock.
I went up it, heading for
the Outlands.
XXI
I had never contemplated entering the Outlands, that
mountain country beyond the cave. I went up the slope to the ridge-crest with
the expectation of anyone taking a view of unknown land. I reached the crest
and crossed it as the sun was setting, and I stood looking out across a wilderness,
ridge upon ridge disappearing into the distance, and I was conscious of my own
futility.
Where was my allegiance, to my own time that
stood in peril, to Sara whose ultimate fate might be working itself out finally
as I stood there, or to Smith, Irimia, and those of my own kind to whom I had
given a promise when they helped me to escape? The land before me was empty so
far as I could see. Beneath the frowning mountains, pink in the evening light,
it was torn and folded into ravines and wild gorges. Yet there, if I was to
keep my promise, I was to find a people, a wilder, stranger people than any I
had met so far. And I needed more knowledge yet, I knew. I knew in part what
had happened to our world, but I did not know what single act had caused it.
That I should even find the Out-landers seemed unlikely, far less that I should
make contact with them, and warn them about the intentions of the city, while
that I should get knowledge from them seemed so remote as to be impossible. I
could not imagine them telling me what had happened to our world even if they
knew.
I
went on. I had reached the bare hilltop in the last of the Sim's almost level rays while the gorges of the ravaged country before me
were folded in deep shadows and I went on into it across barren rocky ground.
Below me the ground fell away into the first of many valleys and even as I
walked over the crest of the hill and began the unknown and perilous descent, I
was starting at the wrong time of day I knew.
I
went along a rocky ledge and then climbed down it. I was working down into shadows and the night. And yet I was obsessed by
time. As the sun's light left the hilltops, and I found myself on a valley side
steeper and wilder than the one I had left, with a stream at the bottom in a
gorge-like cleft that flowed in a different direction from the ones that fed
the plain, I thought I must go as far as I could that night. At the latest
tomorrow, I thought, or rather I hoped quite wildly, I must come back again and
reach the cave. I hurried on to cover the most ground I could, and leapt into
shadows and took risks in the growing darkness. Yet I was deceiving myself I
believed I knew. If I did not cover a great,
an almost impossible distance while the light lasted and before darkness
finally stopped me, it could take days or even weeks to penetrate that wild and
savage country, and I was balanced on a knife-edge between haste and sheer
disaster.
How
I escaped killing myself that night I do not know. I went down the valley side
and along the lip of the gorge, seeking a way to cross it and penetrating
deeper into the Outlands at an almost running pace in the last of the light
even two hours after sunset. I was behaving as though pursued, and perhaps I
was pursued, by a sense of failure, because I had seen so much in Center City,
and learned so much and yet not the right things, and only escaped by giving
promises I knew I could not keep. And yet I discovered that it was only in men
that land was lacking. As I turned a corner
of a rock-face, swinging round it on a ledge in a way that would have been fatal for me had it
not continued on the other side, it seemed to me that the rocks had come alive.
It was a herd of ibex or mountain goat-like creatures that went away from me like
shadows, moving ahead and then up a slope that was watered by wind-blown spray
from a waterfall and that was uncertain underfoot with tufts of grass-like
plants.
I reached my limit shortly after that.
Already the strongest light was coming from the stars. I found myself a rough
shelter beneath a rock and I was thankful for my flying suit in the icy air. I
lay a while and thought.
Suppose
I did get back, I thought. Suppose I did not destroy myself in this journey of
futility, how would I tell what I had seen to people in my own time? I, and
more especially they, had not the words. In my own mind now, I could only tell
myself what I had seen and known by using words like "archaic" and
"Antiquist" and "hybrid". To tell them anything, I would
have to teach them a language to begin with.
I lay there looking out from my rock, that
formed a shelter and shadow over me, across the valley at the farther valley
side, at a part that I had not seen in daylight, and at the mountain crags and
slopes and hilltops that I could see faintly as a darkness against the sky
beyond. And I was like the chief of some savage tribe, I thought, that had been
transported by air for political reasons and shown the wonders of New York.
"Go back and tell your people what you have seen," they might say to
him. But I knew now how futile that was. He would be talking a foreign language
if he tried to tell them. It would be pointless for him to talk of the wonders
of the buildings and the city transport system when they could not envisage a
city in the first place and had no words for "train" or
"bus".
It
was deeper than that, I thought, looking at those black crags against the
stars. Lacking the words, they would not even have the concepts.
And then a light shone out.
I want to be clear about
it. It seemed to me to be a light.
It
was like a searchlight revolving, or a far-away light-house beam rotating, on
an infinitely distant crag, and I thought at the time that could not be. I was
in a land that was said to be populated by the wildest savages.
The
light was there to my eyes and senses. It flicked on and off in the spaces of
the darkness, a fixed point in the infinite solitude of open country. And,
strangely, it seemed to affect my mind and fill my soul with longing.
It
was my imagination probably, I thought, that the light, having revolved and
swept the country, came back and settled itself, for a few seconds duration of
a steady beam. It seemed it shone on me.
It
was gone, and the night was as dark and empty as before. A camp-fire, I
thought, of some distant nomadic people. I knew there were some people
somewhere.
I
tried to persuade myself that the light had had the flickering form of
firelight. I lay looking out into the night for a long time before I fell
asleep.
I
was awake an hour before dawn and cold and hungry, believing nothing except
that I should get back to the cave and go back and tell my story. I remembered
the light in the night and looked at the distant crags. I could see nothing
there. I felt in the pockets of my flying suit and found an emergency pack, a
flat can of food, enough for a single meal. That settled it, I thought. I ate
the food but had to wait until later, until I crossed a stream, to get a drink.
I would go on, not in a wild rush but steadily, until an hour before noon. Then
I would have to begin my journey back.
I
went on, and nothing happened. The stream in the gorge, I discovered, sank ever
deeper into a rocky cleft that became virtually a tunnel, and when I came to a
rocky bridge where a slab from a land-fall had fallen across the gorge, I
crossed it. I sought the high ground again then, attempting to follow a ridge
that led in what was generally the right direction, keeping my back to the cave
and rurining deeper into the Outlands.
It
was at this time that I began to be troubled by visions. They were not credible
visions. At least at first there seemed to be no deception in them. Naturally
their first effect on me was to make me worry about my state of mind. When I
saw what seemed to have the form and shape of an old Germanic warrior standing
on a rocky outcrop about a quarter of a mile away, and when I looked again he
vanished, I thought of the strain I had undergone, the strangeness, and I wondered
what happened to people who were in a totally alien environment for a long
time.
I went on. It was not yet mid-morning. I
reacted in the way people do when they first feel themselves troubled by
halucinations. I refused to accept that I had seen anything at all. While I
might have taken it that it was a sign I should go back, I became a shade more
obstinate. I was all right, I felt. I was even feeling quite well by then, and
I refused to believe in visions in country of inspiring grandeur, where I was
walking and making tiny, even trivial progress under the shadow of great white
peaks that hung in the sky to my left, in clear mountain air. It was certainly
not going to make much difference. I would go on till noon.
I
turned and surveyed the country from my ridge. I had a feeling then as though
someone was reaching for my mind. I resisted it strongly as people do a
stranger's deliberate touch. And then I realized I could see a tiny trail of
human beings crossing a distant hill slope.
Humans?
They could be. The leader, seen from that distance, seemed to be a generously
proportioned, hairy man in furs. He was followed by two or three smaller and
more slender figures similarly dressed, one of whom seemed to be carrying
something in her arms. Behind them was a straggle of youths and children.
They
fitted my preconceptions, the ideas I had acquired about the Outlands. But I
took my eyes off them for a moment and they were gone.
Not only were they gone, but assuming that
the hillslope was where I now saw it was, I could not have seen them as I had
in the first place. They would have been far too small and distant. They must
have been enlarged. They were another vision.
I felt the reaching for my mind again, a
sensation that was soft and quite insistent. Dimly, I seemed to hear a voice.
It said: "Who are you and what are you? You are not the right kind. You
should go back."
I
do not believe in telepathy. It is one of those airy nothings that people like
to believe in as a fancy. The way the events impressed me was that in broad
daylight, in dangerous mountain country, I was hearing voices and seeing
visions.
I stood where I was on a flat shelf of rock,
on the ridge with a valley and mountain crags beyond, and thought: I am not
mad; I am a hard-headed materialist archaic; I was even chosen, long ago at the
rocket base, for my equilibrium of character; and I have every intention of
going on at least till noon.
"Thank
you," the voice said. T see your mind unclearly, but you must go
back."
It had answered my thoughts. I went forward.
I had not come all this way for nothing. I found myself confronting a
machine-gun post, two men in a fox hole with a gun trained in my direction, a
hundred yards ahead. I went towards it. The movement was automatic. I had come
to make contact and that was what I intended to do. I had even begun to raise my hands. It disappeared.
"You
must go backl" the voice said firmly. I believed I detected in it a note of annoyance. It was searching in my mind for more
visions. It was from my own mind these visions came. I knew its weakness. It
could only show me what I already had.
"Show yourself!" I said. I did not
need to say the words. The thought was enough, but I looked around from that
high ridge and there was no one there. The ground was a series of steps and
rocks along the ridge. I went along them towards the mountain, towards the
valley at the other side. "You can't stop me," I said.
T will."
"But how?"
"I will show you
another vision."
I laughed grimly. If visions of a machine-gun
post, of stone-age man and a Germanic warrior did not stop me, I could not see
that anything else would. I was going to make him show himself. I was under the
impression that he was there.
I
stepped from rock to rock. Some of the gaps were big. I was in the air,
stepping out for a rock, when I saw it was not there. The rock towards which I
had launched myself had vanished.
I
fell heavily on rocky ground, twisting my ankle and striking my head against a
stone. I must have been unconscious for a little time.
It
was the same ankle, the one I had damaged when escaping from Center City.
XXII
I had
known, even as I fell,
that I was going to be in a desperate
situation if I injured myself while alone, so far from the cave, and in an
exposed position in the Outland mountains.
I
knew it was gone, my hope that alone and unaided I would get back to the cave
that night. I did not know if I would ever get back over all that land that I
had crossed. The sphere, the laboratory and Galbraith and Sara had never seemed
so far away.
What I heard was voices.
"An archaic moony. There were some items
of his private experience I did not get, but he described himself as an
archaic."
"How clear have you got him? Is he in
good range of the transmitter now? Can you scan him clearly?"
"He's on the line-of-sight beam. I
should have the pattern complete, when he comes alive, inside two
minutes."
I wondered where I was. I was sprawled on the
ground. The view before my eyes, when I opened them, was a chain of mountains,
white peaks and a volcano among them, leaning over at an impossible angle. I
adjusted my idea of the horizon and discovered which way was up. I began to
struggle.
"Heron?
This is Widgeon here. He's got some memory of rocket firing. I don't get this
pattern. Moonshot rockets aren't in the technology of the city, are they?"
"You
must be mistaken, Widgeon. The only people remotely dreaming of that
technology today are those on the Atlantic continent. We ourselves won't touch
it. It's too expensive."
"What
about China? He doesn't seem Chinese. But these! memories are quite clear. I'm
getting constant pictures of big machines. There's even something about a
synchrotron. Where's Teal? Teal, I'm calling you in the Yang-Tse islands. This
is Widgeon, California."
"Hello,
Widgeon. I am working Seagull, France. Is this important?"
"Subject
here, Teal, shows images of rocket firing and something called a synchrotron.
How advanced recently is the Tibetan pocket of technology? I'm trying to trace
him."
A female voice cut in:
"Widgeon
and Teal. This is Seagull, France. Widgeon is making Class Two mistake I think.
He's confusing live memories with reading, fiction. I know, I did it
recently."
I
sat up. It was natural to hear voices and singing sounds after a blow on the
head, I thought. I looked at the mountains, the desolate scene around me. How
was I going to get back? I tried to get up and pain shot up my leg. I collapsed
back to the ground again and crouched and held my ankle.
"With all due respects, Seagull, I don't
make mistakes like that."
"Widgeon,
this is Heron. In this world, such memories are impossible."
"You suggesting he dropped from the sky,
from Mars? His most recent memories are of the city."
I
sat quite still. The voices were clear and loud now. They faded when I bent to
hold my ankle and put my head behind a rock. I lifted my head and looked over
the rock. High on a crag on a mountain across the valley I could see what
looked like an automatic radio transmitter that I had not picked out before.
For a moment I thought it was another vision. Then I saw that that would be
the place, and the height, from which I believed I had seen the light, the
rotating beam, the night before.
"Widgeon?
This is Teal. Did you say a synchrotron? This is interesting. I suggest you hook
him into circuit."
Transmitter,
I thought! I wondered if it were possible. The tiny electric currents, the
cellular circuits of the brain. But we, with our most sensitive instruments,
had only been able to record the most general wave-patters of electrical energy
in the brain.
"He's in. I'm not sure
he knows it."
I
looked down into the valley. There was nothing there. Some patches of green and
a stunted bush or two in the valley bottom. I was in wild and desolate country.
I was going to have enormous difficulty getting back. I could feel the state of
my ankle now. It was possible that I was
delirious. I decided to treat the voices as real.
"I
know I'm in," I said. "Who are you? I've come here to bring
Outlanders a message from the city."
I
was met with a response of silence through which I could feel at least half a dozen people, scattered round the world, just
listening to my mental voice. I do not know how I knew it. I just did. As soon as I threw myself into the contact I seemed
to be aware, simultaneously, of a million things, of a scene through a window
onto a wooded tree-slope, of a half-barren, crop-bearing island in the middle
of a yellow flood, of a rocky, cliff-top eerie
above a raging sea. And there was something more than that, an elusive quality.
I was in contact, I knew instandy, with a
different type of
'I
mind.
It was a kind that persisted through all the individuals. It was not like mine.
I
had a sense of a crowd of individuals pressing up to look and then withdrawing.
I knew what it was. I could feel it as their withdrawal-reaction. If they were
alien to me, I was even more alien to them. It was a sensation we might have if
we had tentatively offered intimate contact to a chimpanzee and found he took
it and pressed his face against us.
It left me disillusioned.
"What
is this message you say you were bringing to the Outlanders from the
city?" The voice came to me formally and seemingly from far away.
I
wished I could see them. It was that more than anything that I lacked. They
were beings, creatures I imagined of warmth and light. I had, for an instant,
been allowed close contact with them. During that period I had even been able
to see out through their eyes and sense their quality of mind. But none of
them, I guessed, had been looking in a mirror. And now once again, and from
then on, I was only hearing voices. I wished I had known that moment was
coming, and what it meant, so that I could have taken greater advantage of it
when it came.
I
cannot explain this. As I have said, it is partly that I do not have the words
and partly that I do not even have the mental concepts to tell what I saw and
felt. It was what Irimia had told me. I had a sense of only a dozen or so of
them, rare creatures, scattered around the world. I was conscious of their
difference from myself. But it was the nature of that difference that set up in
me a hopeless longing. Their whole aim, the nature of their lives was different
as Irimia had told me it would be and must be in quite new creatures.
And
I, by their withdrawal, by their use of formal words, was rendered lonely. I
had a sense of their eyes looking at me while I could not see back. I was alone
again on a silent summit, and I knew they could see me there while I could not
see them.
I
was a lone creature, injured, with a damaged ankle and far from my base, my
lair, and I knew they would have sympathy with me, as we would with any injured
animal, except that there was something else for them, some other, larger plan,
the nature of which I tried to, but could not, grasp.
"The city is about to invade the
Outlands," I said. I was met with a silence, not words but a sense that
they knew that already. "I was to organize the wild Outlands tribes to
resist," I said. "I cannot do it. It is a matter of the survival of
the archaics within the city."
I
was throwing myself on their mercy as I confessed. It was all I could do. They
were not the Outlanders I had come to find. They were at once far fewer, and
farther away, and infinitely greater.
Their words came to me clearly, but cooly and
without expression as they communicated with one another. "You having
trouble with the American City, Widgeon?" "Not greatly. It is at
present ruled by the hybrids who are an evolutionary cul-de-sac. That must be altered." "You will
not intervene on behalf of the archaics, surely?" "Not exactly. They
are an impossible political influence. Their descendents have not mastered it
any more than their ancestors did. There is a swan-necked variety there that
has the virtue at least of tolerance."
So
much for Smith and Irimia, I suddenly thought and realized. They would make
their revolution and someone else would claim it. I did not know how the Voices
would manage it, I thought bitterly, resting on one knee with my hand on a rock
like a man communing with himself on my lonely summit. But they would do it.
Few of them there might be, but I had a sense of power, of certainty, of unknown
aims to be accomplished in every inflection of their voices.
Then I felt them turn their attention to me
again, not malevolently but insistently. That was one of the ways in which they
differed from us, their lack of indifference. I was something they did not
understand, and therefore
they had to know.
"Who
are you?" This time it was a silent question from many voices.
I attempted defiance.
"Who are you?" I said.
They
began to take me apart. I could feel them stealing, quite irresistably, across
my memories. It was like a process of dissection, but mental, like knives and
deep dredges entering my mind and bringing up my most trivial memories to the
surface, even memories' I did not know I had and things I believed I had
forgotten. I did not know if I would survive the process, and if I did I knew I
would be a changed man, as people are said to be after total psychoanalysis.
"Stop!" I cried.
They stopped. They did not wish to harm me.
It was only
what they had to do in pursuance of some plan that was.
greater than anything I could think of. And if I cooperated,
I felt, as though a warm current were flowing round my
mind, healing their incisions, there was no need of it. jj
"We
are the seed," the female voice of Seagull told me'J
gently. "The survivors and progenitors. Our children arel
the new beginning, the inheritors from the Rift." ]
She
told me knowing that I would not understand it, as! an adult will reason with a
child.
"I have come out of
time," I said.
I expected at least some
surprise, but there was none.
"That,"
Heron said quietly, "is exactly what we were afraid of."
"Tell
me," I said desperately. I could not see them. I fixed my gaze on the
distant mountains. "What was it, this Rift? I must find out. That is what
I am here to do! I must find out what caused it."
Their voices talked among themselves then.
They did not address themselves to me.
"He
knows too much already," Teal said, that voice that, if I was to believe
them, was in far-off China.
"It is a question of whether I can let
him go back," said Widgeon. "What can I do with him?" "We
do not kill," said Seagull.
"It may be necessary," said Heron,
"to maroon him somewhere."
I
cried out to them, actually speaking the words out loud, I believe, so that
they echoed over the silent mountains: "I don't know, but I must know! It
is a question of the survival of our world!"
They were silent, apparently in some kind of
contemplation.
T propose to let him go back," said
Widgeon.
The silence took on a tone
of gravity and dissent.
"He
is a small thing," said Widgeon finally, having noted their feeling but
going against it. "Though he has tampered with time, I do not think he has
the strength and intelligence to do us any harm."
He addressed himself to me.
"You
will go back," he said. "You will go straight back, at once. And you
will not attempt to come this way again. You will find out nothing."
I
looked at the rocks around me. I moved my ankle and winced with pain. He
"saw" my thought.
"Sit down," he
said.
I sat down.
"Now take your foot in one hand and your
leg in the other. Let me direct you!" He sounded near.
I
felt that someone was reaching into my hands. He was putting on my hands and
arms like a pair of gloves. I relaxed and tried to let him treat me as a
doctor. My own hands gripped my leg and foot. I had a moment of excruciating
pain as he pulled and twisted. It was incredible that I could bear to do it.
But it was he who had control of the motor nerves of my arms and hands, not me.
I felt him withdraw like an actual body moving away from just behind me then
flicking into the distance.
"It
is finished," his voice told me. It sounded away in circuit again, no
doubt from California.
"How do you do it?" I said. I stood
up on my leg again. It felt stiff and it hurt, but it worked. "Thank
you."
"It
is the particular tendency of our development that has enabled us to specialize
in neural-electrical techniques and electrical propogation," he said. He
spoke with perfunctory cheerfulness. "It is the ultimate power."
I
turned and began to walk down the hill and the mountainside, back the way I
had come. It was pointless to argue with him or any of them. I knew that now.
The
sun had moved to the west. I knew I was not going to get back that day.
XXIII
I thought about it as I camped under the rock again
that night, arriving to a foodless camp after a limping progress.
What
was it? What had I heard and seen and done? I had fallen, and struck my head
against a rock and twisted my ankle. I had been light-headed.
I
lay there watching the last of the light fade from the peaks and the shadows
creep up the valley and the darkness deepen to the sound of falling water from
the gorge. I watched, looking away over the valley at the distant crag.
Irimia
had said no creatine could contemplate its own successor. Liebnitz had said
that for man, his kind of man, to control and guide evolution, would be the
only way of avoiding strife and bloodshed and the cruelty of survival of the
fittest for a million years. But both of them were theorizing. Neither had been
to see, as a true scientist would, what was actually happening in the Outlands.
I had been into the Outlands. I was still in
them, against my will. And I must not sleep, I thought. I must wait to see if
that beam shone out again, as it had the previous night. I must find out if
what I had seen, or rather what I had heard and felt, was real.
How
had they set up that transmitter, if it was one? How had they done anything, a
dozen creatures, separated and isolated around the world? But then how had man
ever done anything, homo
sapiens, our
own species, born incredibly in Central Asia in an ice age?
I must not sleep, I
thought.
Man
had had one great gift, his use of tools. But that was past now, in this age
and time. I had seen a bird use a tool, I remembered, when I had first come into
the new environment. Tool-using, tool-making even, was no longer man's unique
possession, and the birds, many species of them, were even later in the
evolutionary chain than man. They were ready, they were waiting to take over if
anything happened to man and his many descendents of human kind.
But
the people who called themselves the Seed, I thought, had no need actually to
come to the place to set up that transmitter. It must be within range
of another transmitter, be one of a chain. And if they wanted anything done
they had only to take over some other creature, as Widgeon had taken over my
arms and hands as he had set my ankle. Any creature would do for them, provided
it had a brain and hands. I understood what he meant when he calmly said they
had the ultimate power.
A
new kind of tool. A new land of ability. But not only that. A new land of
experience too. I had been granted, if only for an instant, an entry into their
communion. It was sad, I thought, that I had not known what pure intimacy and
understanding was before. I had not realized that we humans, we homo sapiens, were limited; that we were not the best kind
that could ever be. And I did not find it any easy knowledge.
Our communications systems, proud as we were
of them, were infinitely laborious by comparison. We could span the world with
words, we said. And so we could, with the aid of a vocabulary that it took us a
third of a lifetime to acquire, with the aid of a giant industry devoted to
turning those inadequate symbols for our ideas into electro-magnetic waves,
then turning them back again into sounds, so that air waves reached the ears of
a listener and resulted, all too often, in misunderstanding.
The
Seed, the Voices, communicated directly, by electrical impulses, from mind to
mind. I had heard them as words, true, but they could communicate as well by
images. Then-memory store was held in common. They knew, they did not
interpret, one another's feeling. Speech had been man's greatest and most
useful tool, but they had far outstripped it. They were living in a quite new
sphere of experience and existence, and because of that alone they were man's
successors.
Lying
there, watching the stars move slowly overhead, I found myself looking out at
the sky as into the depths of the universe. Irimia had not known what she was
saying, I thought, when she had asked me "What is God?" Dull earth
had taken life upon itself and they become humble crawling creatures. In a
flash of time, as eternity went, they became beings who looked to the universe
as a whole and thought of it with wonder as they tried to comprehend it, and
who sought to claim it. Maybe we, man, never would claim it now, I thought. But
life would. Life moved like a growing blaze across and through those
electro-magnetic fields that were the endless evolutions of the stars. Through
a universe of space and matter that science, as it comprehended it, made
steadily more abstract, life moved as an expression of will and power and
purpose. And we, dull humanity, had never understood but only wondered about
our aims.
We
flickered into consciousness here and there, tiny eyes and minds and mouths in
the stream of life. We came, and opened our eyes in wonder, and we went. This
life of ours seemed puny, useless, so full was it of questions that remained
unanswered. Yet each eye was brighter, each mind was larger, clearer, more
comprehensive. With each new being, poet, scientist or musician, a world was
bom. What did it matter if, as Liebnitz said, all our science, all our
knowledge, was just another tool, a fiction to describe events as were the old
religions, and a means for the furtherance of our desires? Our desires
themselves were the thing, the ability and the craft to hope and feel. It was
that which was the root of life, not "I think, therefore I am," which
would give existence naively to man alone, but "I feel, therefore I
live," from the lowest amoeba to the Seed.
Or
was I delirious still, I thought, since I was thinking this way? The night air
was chilly, and I wondered if I had been delirious all the day.
And then I saw it.
The great beam of light swung out, for I knew
it must be a great beam now. It circled the earth as I knew it must be circling
from other stations, shining beneficently through the darkness and sweeping
over hills and valleys and taking cognizance of all living things.
"Not
a creature shall come to harm," I thought, "but I shall know of
it." Who were the Seed?
Voices, I thought; voices who gave themselves
bird-names and who were watching through the night.
I
slept then, after I had seen the beam from that distant lonely station shine
out over me.
The
following morning my ankle, though stiff at first, was better than it had been
the day before, and I went on steadily towards the cave. I had not got what I
had come for, I knew. I had not discovered that single item of knowledge by
possession of which we in our time could prevent the new world coming into
being. Indeed, I was no longer sure I wished to find it, or that we had any
right to do that, but I was content to go back with what I had and leave the
future for events to prove.
XXIV
It was
a slow awakening out of a
deep unconsciousness. My eye saw a rock-hewn ceiling and moved on to the angle
of a white-lined wall. Somewhere in my field of vision was an electrical
apparatus of a complicated kind. I was flat on my back and I did not know where
I was, but I was content to he there.
A
voice that seemed to come from a distance, but a known and familiar and
careworn female voice, said: "Doctorl I think he's coming round."
I
did not know how or why, but I was glad to hear that voice.
There
was a glint of glass, a mirror in my field of vision. Below the mirror was some
kind of wall. I began to feel I should know that place. It was familiar with
its warm and infinitely comforting smell of air-conditioned air. There was a
lingering smell of ozone from high voltage machinery somewhere. I tried to make
out something I could see in a mirror. It was a transparent sphere, now open
and in two halves, set on a plinth and with the upper half lifted, like an egg
broken open.
I
knew then. I had a sense of vertigo, some memory of an experience recently
undergone. But I was back.
I
remembered. I remembered coming back from a journey, where was it? Into the
Outlands. It was all coming back to me. There was the cave, a climb along a
rocky ledge and entering the cave, and then, miracle of miracles, the sphere
inside it. Opening the sphere and getting in. Waiting in apprehension,
remembering the sensations of the transfer, wondering if this time I would
survive it.
There
was something else. There had been something in the sphere. A box containing
two tiny capsules, and a note:
"Judgen.
Take these on your tongue. Keep them in your mouth and bite them when the
transfer starts." Drugs. They had gotten my report about the outward
journey. That was why I had been unconscious.
I
tried to sit up. I knew where I was now. I was back in the laboratory, on the
safe side, after being taken unconscious from the sphere. As I moved my head I
saw a doctor standing over me with a hypodermic needle, Sara standing beside
him with an expression of care and anxiety on a harrowed face, Strassen
stripping off a protective suit, and Galbraith and three people I did not know
with the General in the background.
"Howard!"
Sara said. "Lie still! Don't spoil it now. If you knew how we've waited
for you these last two weeks!"
Two
weeks. It did not register in my mind at first. I was lying back again,
thinking how well they had prepared for my return, a doctor and specialists in
attendance, and even a couch for me to lie on and Strassen ready to go in and
get me from the sphere. And then I thought: two weeks!
I
sat up abruptly. I said: "Two weeks?" I stared at them, no longer
mentally hazy now. Their drugs, whatever they were, had saved me from that. But
I began to work it out: the day I left, the day in Center City, the day of my
escape—it was nothing like two weeks!
"Take
it easy, Judgen," Galbraith said. "Time doesn't run at the same rate
at the place you've been to as it does back here. Waiting, we've found that
out!"
Sara
had come to me. She was standing by the couch on which I had been lying. Her
hand was on me and her arm around my shoulders, trying to ease me back.
"Wait, Howard, wait!" she was saying. But I put my arm around her
waist and dropped my feet off the couch. I sat up and faced them.
"But you don't
know!" I said.
"No,"
said Strassen, taking his foot out of the leg of the silver-coated protective
suit. "We don't know where you've been or what you've been doing since the
sphere came back empty except for the log book with that inexplicable, crazy
message of yoursl"
I simply sat there staring
at them.
Galbraith,
looking queerly at me, said: "It's been particularly hard on Sara."
I took her hand. I was sure it had. Sending
the sphere repeatedly and having it come back empty. Sending it—but there just
had not been that number of days over there for it to appear. I was back all
right. We were faced with a major discrepancy in all our thoughts and theories.
They
were looking at me expectantly. The doctor leaned over me and pulled back my
eyelid and looked at the pupil. "He's all right," he said. "He'd
better not move or try to go anywhere yet a while, but he can talk." And I
sat silent knowing that I had better be careful just what I said.
The
General had been patient. His expression was savage. He knew as well as I did that
there had been things we had not expected. The effects of the transfer on me
had not been something I could help and he was not suggesting yet that I be
courtmartialled for a breach of orders. But he was waiting with increasing
urgency for an explanation.
"All right, Majorl You
can talk!"
"Yes,
Sir. There's a whole world over there. I've a long report to make. This isn't
going to be a matter of a few words."
Strassen
freed himself from the suit. He came over and looked down at me, wondering,
conscious. Galbraith's eyes had narrowed.
Reckman, whom I had not noticed somewhere in
the background, was indefatigably pursuing the security angle. He was saying
formally and insistently, "Will all civilians and personnel not actively
engaged in the experiment please leave the room!"
I
watched them going, the doctor taking a last look at me, not hiding his
annoyance that he had been called in, kept waiting maybe a dozen times for
nothing, and now, when things were interesting, he was being dismissed. But it
was a closer, and at the same time harder and more knowledgeable gathering
that was left behind in the now all-too-familiar underground laboratory.
"It's something Strassen
said just now," I said.
They looked at Strassen, except Sara who
looked at me and then the General. "Does he have to talk and think just
now?" she said.
I was all right, I believed. I squeezed her
hand. "How long have you been sitting at the control desk?" I asked
her. Then I looked at Strassen. "You got my message," I said.
"The log book. You got them when the sphere came back without me on the
first day?"
They
were all watching me. They did not know what it was about, but they were
watching. Strassen looked at me and then went across the floor of the
laboratory and round the control desk. He went to the book shelf where they
kept technical notes and data in bulky files. He came back with my original
log-book, the one I recognized as empty but for a single entry. He showed it to
me and I read what I had written again, the entry in the middle of the page
scrawled in what looked like a child's handwriting that I could hardly
recognize as mine.
I read it out to them,
first saying:
"You say the sphere
was empty apart from this?"
"Yes," said
Strassen.
"I
am sending you the skull," I read. "I cannot come back at once. This
journey is very bad. If you send someone else, put him in an iron lung and give
him sedatives before you send him."
I
looked at them all, first at the General and then specifically at Galbraith.
"What happened to the skull?" I
said.
They
looked as though they did not understand me, or did not believe me. I could
have been introducing something for their confusion.
"You mean you sent
it?" Strassen said.
"I
sent it," I said. "I put the log-book in the sphere and the skull on
top of it. And I'm not just remembering and relying on recollections of the
kind of mental processes I had at that time. It happened to me at what by my
time is only an hour or two ago. I came back into the cave and I saw the sphere
was there! I came to it to get into it. And on the way I passed the headless
skeleton. I looked at it as I passed it and wished it wasn't there, with all
that it implied. I was returning. I was climbing through the cave again across
the rocks."
From
their expressions as they stood looking at me in the laboratory that they must
all but have lived in and occupied almost night and day for fourteen days I
saw that they were realizing for the first time that something real had
happened to me during the period I had been away.
Real
not only for me but for them. Except for the missing skull.
XXV
The projection
room in the university was
blue with smoke. The fights were on, and round the room were tables at which
sat the Reckman's staff of Intelligence department's i recordists and transcribers. On the screen was a faded picture,
disregarded now the lights were on and all but obliterated by the competing
midnight illumination. It was a picture they had had to send a camera to get to
check my story, the cave with a now headless skeleton, but no one had looked at
it for a long time, not since they had lowered the lights temporarily and
flashed it on there when it came back from processing in the middle of my
telling of the story that it confirmed.
"So
I came back from the Outlands," I said. "I had been there, why? On a
mission for us? On a mission from Center
City? And I lay under that rock again,
waiting for the night to end and looked up into the night sky and felt what I
was telling you until that rotating beam flashed out . . ."
"You
stayed there the night and then came back to the cave, Major?" the General
said. "It's that we're interested in, what you did, and not your feelings."
"Yes, sir!" I
said. "It seems to me it was part of it"
"Why?" said
Strassen.
They
were tense after the time I had taken in the detailed telling of it all. A day
had elapsed since I had come back, a day broken by one period of rest and one
experiment, but a day without let-up so that everything that happened seemed
part of a constant and continuous process. The General was grim-faced and
Strassen was sharp and light. I quitted my place by the screen, where I had
stood while I told my story. I had finished my narrative if they wanted to take
it that way. I went to sit with Galbraith and Sara and Reckman on the chairs.
Our company had ceased to be a lecture, a report, and become a conference,
though the time was midnight: it was true, as it had been from the beginning,
that we did not know how much time we had.
"Why?" said
Strassen, insistently.
I
looked at him across the semi-circle of the chairs and through the cloud of
blue smoke from Galbraith's pipe.
"Because
that was part of it, to my mind," I said. "Just who those people I
heard as voices were, and what risk they took, and why they took it, when they
allowed me to come back to my own time. Because my inference from everything
that has happened so far is this: that if we do succeed in discovering what we did, our people in our time, to cause the
earth to erupt, and its atomic fires to bum more fiercely and send out the
radiation that causes a genetic rift,- then their world, and that particular
future that they belong to, will cease to be."
Galbraith
shifted his big head, took his pipe from his mouth and glanced at me.
"It's done something to you, Jud-gen. You're bigger now."
"Voices!" General Bridger's tone
crackled. "You're a serviceman, Major. I thought you were a good one. You
should know what to think of those!"
"Sir!"
I said, "I think that's what worried them: that, without knowing what we
were doing, we were playing with the fate of worlds!"
We watched one another. We saw one another as
people, not as government departments secretly involved. We were on the edge of
human understanding too, and I saw Sara's face slowly set, as though she were
coming to a decision. She had been unusually silent while I had told my story
and after it, but I waited for her to speak now.
Strassen
came in first. He said, "It follows. I told you before we started that if
the future exists, so that we can photograph it and even go there, then
everything we do, whatever it is, must conspire to produce that future. It is
the inevitability, the predetermination of cause and effect, which is the
basis of all science. But there is only one way we can break that chain of
logic. This future, as we have learned about it, must cease to exist and be
supplanted by another."
Sara broke in there. She
cut across Strassen:
"I
have made up my mind! I am sorry if this disappoints anyone, but I am going to
step out of this. I am resigning my connection with the synchrotron! I'm going
to find some other work!"
Galbraith
looked at her quickly, his dark eyes shooting across to her as they sat beside
me.
"That
does disappoint me. There was one experiment I wanted to do. Just one more! I
hoped we'd work tomorrow."
The
General was already speaking harshly over Gal-braith's voice.
"You
can accuse me of not being squeamish! I can't respect these qualms. Major, I
did not expect to have to remind you that your allegiance is to your own
time!" I thought he had finished, but he hadn't. His voice rose a shade
and took on a note of dedicated passion: "Look at this, all of you! Look
around you here! This is real. This is us! I'm not saying that all Judgen
experienced is an evil dream, from the time he left here in that sphere to the
time that he returned.
But it has not a comparable realityl You look
at one another and ask yourselves what you're working for in the here and
now!"
His
hard, sharp eyes fell on me as he said that, then moved across to Sara.
I knew what he meant all
right,
Galbraith also looked at
me.
"That
skeleton has already lost its reality in one particular," he said.
"It has lost its headl It is neither here nor there!"
We
were talking about Sara. They were telling me clearly what I already knew, that
for those bird-named voices to come into existence those events must transpire
that included that Sara should become the skeleton.
They were forcing a clear choice on me, on
themselves, on all of us.
Only
Strassen was thinking ahead now, pursuing a line of his own with his special
brand of logic.
"I
was thinking of that! There are two conclusions we can come to from the
disappearance of the skull. One is that actual and permanent transfer of solid
objects from one time to another is just impossible! There are implications
here. If we had gotten that skull, and it had proved to be Sara's by any tests
we cared to make, we never would have sent it back again! It would have been
coexistent in our own time, a skull in life and its counterpart after death,
and that is an affront to reason! Why is it? Because those two skulls, the very
atoms and material in them, would have gone on, from our time forward; and
there would, even in eternity, have been no point of origin for the second one:
until the first one, that is now in Sara, live, became a skeleton and lay
there, then disappeared, and that would imply that there would positively have
to be that future!"
"And
the second alternative?" Galbraith said, looking at Strassen curiously, as
though he were a brilliant child, not very stable yet, but doing well.
"The
alternative!" Strassen said. He looked at Galbraith and then at me.
"It is the one alternative that fits the facts.
That
skull should never have been sent backl It should have gone on existing as a
conditional future, a future that was dependent on a single event that has not
yet transpired in time. But it was sent backl Judgen forgot eveiything else
when he first arrived, but he did not forget that! He sent it back. But it did
not arrive! And that proves, and only can prove, that that particular future
does not exist!"
"Conditionally,"
I said. "Conditional on our discovering what it was we did to cause their
world, and then not doing it. Otherwise, you'd better keep a sharp look-out on
the floor of the laboratory. The skull may just arrive!"
XXVI
The
next day was
the day Sara had her toothache and decided she must see her dentist, and the
day I went to Nevada.
He
got the plane, commandeered it virtually, using the General's name; I flew it.
After we left Tennessee, it was the plain beneath us.
"You're sure you're
right?" he said. "Why me?"
"What
else?" I said. "You expect me to bring the General? Why didn't you
tell him before you used bis name to get this plane?"
He
looked at me across the cabin of the small army-cooperation aircraft.
"He might have agreed,
he might not," he said.
"Exactly," I said. "But worse
than that. If I told him what I'm telling you, he might have felt it necessary
to go as far as the President to get some action. And by that time, it could
have been too late."
"Is that all?"
He was watching me as I flew the machine,
keeping the engine-revs just above the point that someone had intended to be
the maximum.
"If
it's anyone's mistake, it's your department's. I thought I'd give you the
chance to rectify it."
"How's that?" He was listening to
me carefully, not ready to say yes or no.
"You
remember what those people told me, Selwyn and Liebnitz? They gave me some
spiel not only about our departmentalism, our segregation and sectarianism in
science, which they seemed to infer meant that we don't let our right hand know
what our left is doing. They said there was something else. We called the thing
Security. It shut off criticism. It meant that projects went forward without
being subject to proper scrutiny from the origins of scientific knowledge
across the world." I looked at Reckman.
"That
isn't true. We take care to bring the experts in. It's only a question of who
has clearance."
"Sure. What kind of
experts?"
"Enough.
All the experts on the lists, in government employment, and on that
line." He spoke slowly and deliberately above the engine roar: "The
papers are passed to them for just that purpose. For scrutiny and criticism.
And more than that. To check the mathematics."
"And the men in other
lines?"
"What
do you expect us to do? Clear chemical employees in armaments factories for
possession of our most recent developments in atomic physics?"
"Something like that. Remember what they
said? About their genetic rift and the cause of the radiation from the earth?
It would take a paleontologist, a geo-physicist and an atomic scientist working
together to see it. But your paleontologist and your geo-physicist wouldn't
have clearance. They wouldn't be allowed to know what you were doing with
atomic bombs or even that there was a risk."
He was
silent. I could see him regretting that he had given way to my urgency and
urging and taken the General's plane on what must seem to him a wild-goose
chase across the country on something remote from what we were doing.
I told him what I had told
him before:
"It's
got to be something that will stimulate the underground nuclear forces of the
earth."
"I've
agreed to investigate it with you," he said. "You can't expect me to
believe it."
"What
would start up the earth's atomic forces? Suppose you regard the earth as an
atomic pile, producing internal heat and powering all volcanoes. There's a
molten furnace down there. Not just pockets of uranium scattered in the rocks.
We've got past that view in recent years. The drift currents and the electrical
and neutron flow in the earth's atomic furnace cause the earth's magnetic
field. If you want to stimulate an atomic pile it's a good idea to introduce a
source of neutrons, ions."
He
watched me flying the plane, which was the job I had been originally trained to
do.
"You know a lot about
this?"
"Studying the ionic layers and the
theory of the earth's magnetic field plays a big part in space flight."
He
almost wanted to believe. I could see it. But it was the wrong idea from the
wrong source. I did not have a degree from any university in geo-physics and
the people who_. did have the degrees did not have the special knowledge he and
I had of what we were doing in terms of ballistic missiles and thermo-nuclear
warheads. "You can't get past it," he said. "We have the word of
all the experts that these bombs won't produce more than the equivalent of
fifty megatons of T.N.T. And that, the geologists tell us, is not even the
power of a small volcano."
"All right," I
said.
He hung on while the plane dipped in a small
air pocket, We could see the mountains up ahead. "How do you get past
it?"
"Your
geologists are thinking of these thermo-nuclear devices they explode
underground in Nevada as just that, as so many megatons of T.N.T. They are
thinking of physical, explosive forces. That's why I said not
"geologist" but "geo-physicist": a man who will calculate
not only physical forces and pressure waves but also the release of hard rays
and a flow of penetrative neutrons from dirty bombs."
I
checked the altimeter and the fuel gauge. It was awkward. We were going to have
to land for gas. I saw he did not answer.
"We
know less about our earth," I said; "even a geo-physicist knows less
about the interior of our earth beyond ten miles down than a cosmologist knows
about the interior of a red-dwarf star at a distance of fifty million
parses."
I
had him coming round. He said: "I do know about this particular batch of
bombs they're exploding underground tomorrow in Nevada. The reason they're not
exploding them in the atmosphere is that they're particularly dirty
bombs."
It
lasted while we landed to take on fuel and then he thought again after we had
climbed and hung in the sky above the Utah mountains.
"I
don't believe you," he said. T can't believe our men would make a mistake
like that."
"It's the kind of
mistake they said we would make."
"I don't believe
you."
We
flew on through the day and it was the same when we saw the Nevada slopes, the
area inside a cordon on the surface, of barren empty land where they had had
dug deep mine shafts beneath the hills and had a semi-circle of tiny huts
facing out towards a mountain slope. On the surface we would never have got
inside that cordon." We would have stopped at the first fence, been halted
by our lack of special passes. But they did not shoot down the army plane as I
circled once and came in to land on their special strip in the middle of all
that wild and open country.
The
huts looked bigger from the ground. They had mess-rooms for mining engineers
and special bunk-houses for all the scientists who were to observe. Aircraft
had been pouring in all that day. We were just another, but I had to make our
weight felt. "We are working under the personal orders of General
Bridger," I told the Colonel who formed the barrier who should have
stopped us. "You can check with Washington. Judgen and Reckman under
Bridger from the proton-synchrotron. Something new has come up in our line of
atomics there. We have to investigate its specific relation to these
bombs."
It was a bluff. It was a bluff that would
work so long as they communicated with Washington and not with Bridger. All he
knew was that we had gone and taken his personal plane. We had to work fast,
and we could not work fast even when I inserted myself in a group of the higher
scientists and told them that we had special information derived from our work
on the synchrotron that their bombs would leak a penetrative radiation into the
earth with unknown results.
They were interested. They gathered around, a
group of unoccupied scientists round a table in - a staff-hut waiting for the
show that was to be put on the following day under the mountain slope across
which the shadows had descended across the valley. But they discovered rapidly
that I did not know enough and someone came in and said: "Are you the man
under General Bridger? A message came through to say he's on his way
here." He looked at me significantly and said: "You don't seem to be
in good odor with him," And one of the scientists said: "What exactly
are these results you've been getting with the synchrotron?" I felt it was
all up after that. They were right, of course. I was making charges about their
bombs and I had nothing to substantiate them with except a story that I guessed
would cause them to put me in a mad-house if I told it. Reckman had gone off
and was making some security investigation, which I felt sure was futile and
irrelevant, of his own.
General
Bridger arrived, and I knew it when I got a call to go at once to the C.O.'s
office. He was more grimly sorrowful than angry.
"I
had hopes of you, Judgen," he said. "That you were equable, balanced
and reliable. This finishes you, I guess. I've come here personally instead of
having you arrested to get back my plane. All the way to Nevada at the cost of
diverting a special jet, but that's for your past record and not making any
allowance for your actions now. What is this hare-brained story you've been
telling?"
I
told him, and he said: "Why didn't you leave it to the judgment of the men
who know? Why didn't you tell it to me, and I'd have had it wired out here for
investigation?"
"I
thought the investigation would have to be personal and immediate and on the
spot," I said. "Sent over the wires it would have the shape of an
inquiry best answered by exploding the bombs and telling you what happened
tomorrow morning."
He gave me a hard look, grim-faced with experience.
"What else do you think will happen now?" he said. "You think
even I could order an investigation of the atomics departments and their
procedures that wouldn't take months or years? It's a pity Judgen. I liked you.
I thought you had the balance and something more, but you've finished yourself
now not only for this kind of work but for the rocket strip."
Reckman
came in at that point, entering the Nevada testing ground C.O.'s office.
"You!"
the General said. "You are the one who ordered my pilot to come to me
while you took my plane."
"It's
as well I did," Reckman said. "General can you stop these bomb
tests?" He had a file in his hands and he laid it on the table.
General
Bridger looked hard at him and Reckman looked back.
"I
don't know," Reckman said. "It's only that things are beginning to
add up a little. I don't know about these tests. I'm not an expert. It's an
interesting story. I have it here." He tapped the file.
"You
need more than a story to stop bomb tests that have been laid on at the cost of
multi-million dollars," the General said.
"It
begins in Siberia eighteen months ago," said Reckman. "An agent of
ours. He was nothing very special. We might have wondered about it when he
brought off the coup. The complete specification of a new Russian device for
increasing the power of thermo-nuclear bombs. Considering he'd never been
particularly bright before my department might have wondered, I know I would
myself, how he got such a thing so easily. What would you do, General, if one
of our inventors came up with a device so new, so basic and so simple, that it
would be too dangerous to test it in any test you could observe?"
The
General stared at him. For an instant he was
rigid, then his eyes
took on a haunted look.
"Not leak it to the Russians!" he
said. But it was an
answer he gave in hope, still thinking.
"No?"
Reckman sat down before the file. "It would have advantages,
General," he said insidiously. "You would be able to use the device
if the other side tested it and survived. You'd shed no tears if they tested it
and didn't. And it isn't you, you see, it's them. They know we can destroy them
anyway. What have they got to lose, by showing us that they can do the same? A
dilemma for us? Our doubt about whether their device works or not? They may not
know—but we have to know!" He tapped the file. "It's here, General.
This is the file on these tests. This is what they are all about."
I watched General Bridger. It was new to him.
I could see it by his haunted look. And yet what could he do? Even if we were
right, the situation was still the same. The Russians had no need to try the
device until it came to warfare, but since they had it, we most certainly had.
And yet if we were right ... I
watched him. It was he now who was suffering the temptation I had felt, the
choice between the good of his country and the good of humanity at large.
Yet
I saw it. I had an awful sense of it. Because of what he was, it was inevitable
what he had to say.
"The tests must go on.
Reckman, that is final!"
Despair,
I thought? But there was something more. He looked straight at both of us.
"You will go back to Tennessee," he said. "You will take the jet. These are your orders.
Galbraith has thought of something, some new crucial experiment at noon
tomorrow. You will observe"
"An experiment!"
I said.
He looked at me.
He
turned to Reckman. "You will observe there," he said, "while I
watch this end."
He
was putting the two things together, I saw. Even he! He was connecting them despite
himself.
But what he said dryly to Reckman was:
"If there are any developments here, I'll let you know!" It was
despair. Or a haunted feeling that he should do something. Yet all he did about
it was to stay in Nevada while he sent us back to Tennessee. ■ As though,
I thought, that were useful now!
XXVII
I cannot hope to describe, to do justice to those final
scenes in the laboratory.
Sara,
sitting at the control desk, looked across to me and nodded. It was an answer
to my silent question about what had happened at the dentist the previous day.
I
was incredulous. I could not believe they were doing it. I had a sense of
fatality, of inevitability, of finality. But that, I learned in the underground
laboratory, where we had only arrived as it was beginning, was what it was all
about.
We
had only just arrived after travelling through the night and morning, and yet
it was as though we had never been away. Galbraith came forward.
"In Nevada!" I said. I wondered if
anyone would understand. I looked even at Sara accusingly.
He
stopped me interrupting >her, even then, in the midst of the work she was
already doing, while he told me: "Don't blame Sara, Judgen. I have asked
her, told her she must complete this series of experiments. She can't
refuse!"
"But
nowl" I said. I turned to Strassen as he worked at the barrier wall in the
familiar surroundings of the laboratory with its machines and mirrors.
Someone, I thought, must have retained some sanity. I looked at Sara again and
she shook her head at me. Galbraith was right. When he asked a final piece of
work from her she could not refuse him. I went to Strassen.
"What
are you doing?" I said. "Are you determined to help it—to prove that
events are predestined? Even faced with a material future, do you have to give
it a material cause?" I could think of nothing else.
He turned to me from the
mirror and his controls.
"There
is no choice!" he said. He looked at me sardonically. "We're driven
by our own causes, Judgen—haven't you realized that yet? We're as predictable
as the motions of the stars—as the behavior of a rabbit when it's driven by the
chemistry of its glands. It's what I told you: that every moment of the future
is determined by the causes in the past!" But then he looked at Galbraith.
"Except that he doesn't believe me," he told me. "Even that
works out. Because he doesn't believe me, he says he's going to prove it— and
so he fulfills it!"
Standing
in the laboratory with Reckman, I turned to Galbraith. I realized it then. He
was the clue. He held the answer. His was the major part. I saw it now.
"You
are doing this to prove Strassen wrong?" I said. I looked at Sara and the
control desk. "You think you've found a way?"
In
his laboratory he looked at me calmly and formidably. It was he I had to talk
to, to understand.
"It's
an experiment of classical simplicity. I'm surprised we didn't think of it
before," he calmly told me.
What I thought of was of the General in
Nevada, and of the situation in the laboratory, so like the cave. I was sure of
it now. I could not let it happen. I had to hold him up.
Except
that they went on setting up the experiment as we talked.
"To prove or disprove an academic
theory, Professor-even a metaphysical theory—you risk all this!"
"An
academic point?" He answered me while Sara and Strassen went on working,
talking while a deep hum began to fill the laboratory from the great magnetic core.
"You
call it an academic point, whether man has free will or not, whether we can
control the future or whether we are in its control?" he said. His eyes
looked keenly at me.
"But
that is itl" I said. "Perhaps that is just it, that we only think we have free will!"
"Why?" he said. He looked hard at
me, compelling my attention. "Because a biochemist tells you that life
itself is only an extension of atomic matter? Because a behaviorist says your
behavior is a conditioned reflex? Have you been listening to Strassen? Do you
truly think you're quite predictable, Judgen, because you're the son of your
fathers and wear their kind of clothes and think their thoughts?"
He
was talking in abstractions yet Sara was working at the control panel then and
there.
"Does
that matter, Professor. This is it! Does that truly matter? Compared to
this?" I waved a hand.
He
was a man of power. I had seen it. I had seen him deal with other people. And
now, as he looked at me grimly, he dealt with me. It was not only what he said:
"It
matters," he told me. "Listen! If Strassen is right and the future is
predestinate and predictable, then the universe is what he says it is. Not
merely material, but mechanical! Do you like that, Judgen? To be part of a
piece of clockwork that is running down? But suppose it isn't! Suppose a man,
by his will and choice, can alter the future in any little way? Then the
converse holds. Do you think we do this for nothing? Is it nothing if a man can
act by will alone, produce material events with no material cause? Are you a
fool, Judgen, or can you not see that the whole universe is contained in that?
It is the transcendental question. For if one event can happen in the universe
that has no material cause, then there is something more
than matter and materiall"
"But
what?" He had caught me. I was struggling in my mind. I saw Sara looking
at me for a moment with sympathy. In this apparently we were together.
"Are
you trying to produce a scientific proof of God, Professor? A life-force? A spirit
or something beyond the laws of solid matter!" I was awed.
He
looked at me strangely. "If we could do that," he said.
"Wouldn't it be something greater than any risk?" And then he turned.
He knew he had me. He turned to Strassen: "Go?" It was it, the time.
Strassen was working his
machinery to establish a camera on the plinth. It was another of those
experiments. To me it seemed just another. And yet . . . The camera was in the old bell-jar. I could see it in the mirrors,
turned back on us.
"Ready,"
said Strassen, calm in the laboratory. "Ready now to go."
The
camera, I saw, looking in the mirrors, was turned to give a view of the clock
on the laboratory wall above us, and of all our actions. And Sara was now
totally engaged at her control desk. Galbraith looked at her with an expression
of intentness and concentration.
"Ready, Sara?"
"Go," said Sara, watching only what
she was doing now. Yet she glanced at me. "Gol"
The
laboratory clock said noon. I saw Sara's hand go down and I sensed a deeper
note in the hum that filled the laboratory and all the underground chambers of
the synchrotron. I looked quickly through the mirrors at the camera in the
bell-jar, then back at the clock.
The
clock hand moved to a little beyond the hour. After an elapse of one minute
nothing was visible around the camera and the bell-jar, but after that I began
to see it, the formation of the silver mist again, the enclosing sphere that in
a matter of minutes would remove camera and bell-jar from our sight.
"What is this experiment?" I said.
"What are you doing this time?" But no one answered me.
It was three minutes after the hour now, and
the mist around the camera and bell-jar, as seen through the mirrors, was
preceptible now. But Galbraith began to act. He performed a simple action that
seemed to me inexplicable. He stood for a while in thought, as though deciding
just what to do, and then he walked across our side of the laboratory, took a
chair and placed it against the wall, and climbed upon it.
Reaching up to the clock, he stopped it.
While the fingers were registering a little beyond three minutes after the
hour, he stopped them, then moved them back to noon and held them until the
clock stopped, and then got down.
He looked at his watch.
"Keep
the experiment going one more minute," he said, "then ease eveiything
down. We want to get the camera back and get the film out and examine it right
away."
It was a little, simple
thing, so easy when you knew.
XXVIH
I had
a ghastly sense of the
ticking seconds.
They were using a viewer in
the laboratory.
We
were crowded together, in the small space and angle from which it was possible
to watch the viewer screen.
It
was showing the experiment we had just seen, but from the camera angle, looking
back at us. The laboratory was visible in a diminished picture on the screen,
with all of us present in it in the places we had occupied, and the clock above
us on the wall.
The
clock was tiny in the picture, but just large enough for us to see the time
clearly by it. I wondered why.
"The
significance of this experiment," Galbriath said, "is that at this
time, as you see it now, with the experiment beginning, I had not decided what
I was going to do. That is the essence. That is why I could not tell you in
advance."
He
watched. The experiment as seen in the viewer had begun now. The clock hands
had begun to move forward past noon and there was a visible speeding up of
their movement and of our actions in the picture, as always when seen from the
position of the forming sphere.
"I
thought I would stand with a handkerchief held above my head," Galbraith
said. There was a strange dry tension and excitement in his voice. "But at
this point, now, I decided I would stop the clockl"
His
movements were fast in the picture we were watching. He moved all right, but it
was not possible to see what he did. He had become a blur. The clock was not a
blur, however. It was clear with its fingers marking three minutes after the
hour, and moving on.
Then
I looked and looked again. I could not believe what I was seeing.
For
the clock hands, seen clearly in the diminished picture on the screen, were
sweeping on inexorably. They were moving faster as they always did, or had.
But this time I knew that the clock had been stopped.
The
future, I thought? It had been the future at the time it was recording it. It
was something else now.
Who
had said . . . ? It was Reckman, when we had first seen the pictures, talking
to the General in the car. "What the Professor has been showing us is
impossible." But he had not seen anything thenl
I
could not understand it. The camera showed us a future that had been going to
happen—and yet one that had not in fact happened.
In that incredible
situation, it was Strassen's ideas about the universe that were most affronted.
He swept round on Galbraith.
"You
knewl" It was amazement, incredulity, more than wonder. "You knew—you
even guessed that something like this would happen?"
Galbraith looked at him first, quietly. It
was truth, not triumph: "Yes, this is it, isn't it?" he quiedy said.
"The future you thought was fixed and final! By will and effort it can be
changed."
I felt dazed and dazzled,
trying to understand.
"The
future?" I said. I fought for words. "You call it the future—but what
do you mean by that?"
At least I could accept it,
though Strassen could not.
"But
what?" he said, astounded. He was deeply shaken. He looked not like a man
who had been conducting a scientific experiment, but like a man who had seen a
ghost. "You mean that is the nature of the future?"
He made a tremendous
attempt to pull himself together:
"Yet
it was some kind of forecast! What else could it be? It showed a future—but a
future with the clock going!"
He
looked unbelievingly at the viewer, where the short film had run out and coiled
itself around its spool.
"Listen,"
Galbraith said. He quietly looked at all of us. "It showed the future as
it was at the beginning of the experiment." He paused. "Not the
future as it was in the middle of the experiment, when I took a hand and
altered it. Think! That is the nature of the future!"
I
looked at him dazedly. The others were doing the same. We saw it was.
And then I realized: or
thought I did, suddenly.
"You
mean the cave—and Center City, and the Out-lands—that's what the Voices were
afraid of—it could be changed?" I had a tremendous vision.
He looked at me closely and
severely, not agreeing.
"So
easily, Judgen? You think we could change all that so easily? How much thought
do you think it took on my part to invent this experiment, to stop the clock?
Don't you realize what this means? The future is built up gradually from the
past! A whole world you saw, not just a clock! A million inevitabilities. And I
changed the future in one tiny way!"
I tried to understand it. A world, I thought.
A future
that was built up, little by little, from the past. A future, he
meant, that came into being slowly! Already the future
existed, even a hundred years from now. We made it. We
drew it like an artist drew a picture . . . Yet what he seemed
to say was that We could change it, like an artist whojji
scraped off his oils and repainted a little detail . . . But thatl
still left my world, my world of Center City, which I had a
thought the experiment
disposed of, still intact! I looked!
around for Reckman, to ask him what he had said exactly 1
to the General and myself
on that first day when we were I
sitting in the car. J
Reckman was not there! I looked around, but
he seemed j
to have gone out. And Galbraith was talking. '*
It was not to any one of us. It might have
been to himself. J
"A
future that is predictable and inevitable," he was say- 1 ing. "A great canvas already painted in its outlines. It is, in |
all its great events. The tides. The majestic movements of the | stars. The
shape of the Galaxy, that can be predicted for a J million years. But life, the little and new thing . . . Some j spirit?
Or God in the shape of an uncertainty principle that ¡1 is growing. The rest of the universe runs
down from hot to cold, but life builds up. Greater . . . We can shape the small
events and may someday shape the big ones. And yet our future hangs upon us. It
hangs upon you, Sara, like a heavy imminence. I thought to remove it by this
experiment, and now I see I did not . . ."
Reckman came back then. He had been called
out to receive a message.
XXIX
The ultimate. The mercy.
It was hard to believe it
when it happened.
Reckman re-entered the laboratory. He hardly
looked at anyone. He came to me. "For you!" he said.
He handed me a message,
with a world of meaning.
I
looked at his face, at the others who stood around. I opened the message and
slowly read it.
It was the news from
Nevada:
"BOMB TESTS TO CONTINUE AS ORDERED. BUT
NOT NEVADA. CHANGE. NOW INTENDED OUT OF ATMOSPHERE. IN SPACE. SUGGESTED OVER
RUSSIA.
BRIDGER
I looked at the paper in my
hand.
I
seemed to see General Bridger, haunted after a sleepless night, deciding . . .
The
words seemed to blaze on the paper. I felt sick, it looked like such relief. I
wondered only if it was enough. "Over Russia . . ." It did not seem
the end.
I
looked around the laboratory. We were still there. I believed it had done
that. It was the reason we were still alive.
I turned to Galbraith with
the signal.
"He
says a change" I said. "But is it? Is this something
too that will only change the future in a small way?" I asked as though he
could know.
He read the signal and
passed it on to Sara.
Reckman spoke with quiet
intensity: "That's what
the
General
wants to knowl I heard him on the phone. But he wants more than Judgen. He
wants to know if this has changed the pictures you get with the synchrotron, or
if this too is wasted effort!" We all looked at Reckman.
And
then we saw it, how the General too had thought, had wondered, even trying it
at last to see if the kind of action he could take made any change.
"All
right!" said Galbraith. "Francis! Strassenl"
He
had the determination to try again.
And the experiment was almost set up. With
everything there, we had it ready. I saw Sara dare to smile.
Her eyes were full of longing. She showed
eagerness and hope. At last maybe the clouds were falling away from round her.
There was a chance now, I could see she believed. A chance of changing fate . .
.
"Do
you still think we can't do anything against predictions?" I asked her in
those moments as she went back to her control desk. "Do you know?"
her eyes asked.
"A
delayed run with the self-processing camera?" Strassen was saying to
Galbraith. They were fixing the technical details: "A still would
do!"
"Run
upl" said Galbraith to Sara as she reached her desk. I watched her hands
cross the control board.
I
had bitter qualms. I thought what the experiment would mean if the camera came
back and showed us the scene in the cave as it was before, just as I had left
it. What would we do then? Get Sara out, I thought! This was the last. I was
determined to stop it now. The future—I clung to the thought—could be changed
in small ways.
Big
ones? We did not know.
The
magnetic hum deepened again. I thought of my Voices in the Outlands, of Teal
and Widgeon. They had not wanted Widgeon to let me come back in time. They
knew, I realized, what we were only finding out. But Widgeon had sent me back.
He believed that I could only change his time in small ways, if at all . . .
The sphere around the camera darkened as we
watched it
in
the mirrors. The camera and its container vanished, and then came back.
Came back? We could not
believe it.
We
looked with horror at the fading sphere, straining unbelieving to see the
plinth. It seemed disaster.
The bell-jar had been smashed as though
crushed by an iron hand, and the camera tool
We strained to see, not even understanding
yet what we were seeing.
Strassen cried out. We looked at what had
come back to us with nameless horror.
Strassen
had the best view through the mirrors above the wall. He had seen first and,
despite himself, he understood it. "The cave isn't there any morel"
he declared to us. "The camera—the bell-jar! It looks as though we've
tried to smash them through a hillside, to insert them bodily into solid
rockl"
He
turned and looked at Galbraith, and so did we all But Galbraith was simply
looking through the mirrors at the wreck.
"The future has changed," he said.
"We have no access now to ... to
the situation in the cave. It's gone!"
We knew that. It came to all of us, quickly
or slowly. The coincidence of this following the General's signal was too much.
The cause and effect in it was apparent even to Strassen, even though he tried
to refuse to believe it.
Sara
spoke. She had stood by Galbraith loyally, even at the end. Now the cave had
gone, and she was still there, she might have been permitted a reaction. But
she said:
"The future's changed,
but changed to what?"
"How
much has it changed?" Reckman said. He took up the point. "The
General's going to want to know, Professor! Has it changed in detail, or is
there going to be quite another future?"
Galbraith
simply looked at him. It was as apparent to Reckman as to anyone what had
happened when he had tried to find out. If the future of the place where the
synchrotron was situated was to be solid rock, than that was all they were
likely to find out now with Galbraith's machine, unless they built another.
"If
we build another synchrotron," Galbraith said quietly, "it still may
lead to solid rock, or out to some point in space. We don't knowl We are still
ignorant entirely of the kind of warp this machine sets up in time."
Reckman
looked dazed at the prospect of building another synchrotron, at a cost of
hundreds of millions, at a site chosen at random, and with unknown results. But
that was again the way it was about the future.
Sara
had come to me. I took her hand in mine. It was coming to us that we had
reached an impasse. She had not left her work, but found it ended suddenly.
We
could gol I could hardly believe it but that was the way it was. We could go
with the world still there and the future now unknown!
Even so, I spoke: suddenly
very desperate.
"Professor, that world
was very reall"
Galbraith looked at me suddenly, somberly. He
should have been glad, I thought. We were relieved, after all, of the threat of
the situation in the cave.
"So is the arms
race!" Galbraith grimly said to me.
He
did not say any more, and yet I understood. What had he told me? That the
future was built up, little by little, from the past. I thought again of
Widgeon and Teal and my bird-named voices. They would not have allowed me to
come back if they had thought that the future, my future and their present,
could be changed in its entirety.
The cave was gone. But the world of Center
City and the Outlands might still be there, an inevitable product not of one
but of many causes! It might or it might not. We could not know! It could be
that the General's signal indicated a change in human history. But they were
still going to hold the bomb tests, he said, in space, over Russia; and then,
inevitably, if the world went on as it was, there would be others.
I
realized what Galbraith meant. We had not proved anything about the future. We were back where we
started. And it was only that we did not know. Yet the world of Center City
would be hanging over us always now.
Perhaps it too was a threat
that always had been therel
I
turned, and put my arm round Sara's waist. She looked up at me. "It's as
well I have you, Howard!" she said. "It
looks as though I'm out of a jobl This synchrotron is finished. But I can't say
I'm sorry!"
She moved as I took her
out.
We came out, out of the underground passages.
We emerged to the view of Lake Valley, the sunlight, and the open air.
"It's
time!" she said. "I told you I was giving up!" It was not what
she meant exactly. But I understood as we looked out on the world together.
00«
For that is the way it is
today.
Sara
and I are living at the rocket base now. In April we expect what we hope will
be the first of our many, and, we fervently hope, quite normal children. In May
there is just a chance that I may become the second or third man to make a
circuit of the moon. The General has come round to me again, following his
decision about Nevada. And although they are building another synchrotron on
the pattern of Lake Valley, on a more open but at the same time less exposed
site, it will not be finished for about three years, so in the meantime his
guess about the future, or yours, is just as good as mine.
And meanwhile there is only
one other thing.
They
hope to know more about the interior of the earth, and just how it could be
affected by the explosion of nuclear bombs below the surface, when they have
completed the Mohole boring, but they aren't waiting for it of course.
You may have heard of it.
As an off-shore boring, down through the sea-bed where the crust of the earth
is thin, it is a project expected to add gready to our knowledge of the earth's
interior.
If
the Senator gets the appropriation, that is. Otherwise the people I talk to
seem happy to go on knowing nothing. They prefer quite blindly to take the
risk.
The top-secret synchrotron took accurate
photos of the future-and what they showed was disaster, both for the girl who
ran the machine and the world she worked for.
Major
Judgen, astronaut, had trained for a first flight through space. Now he was
called on to put his ability into an untested flight across time. Was his girl
friend's death a certainty — and did that same certainty also doom the
rest of humanity?
Or
was there a way to snatch a double victory from the discoveries to be made on
the day after the world came to an end?