by Andre Norton
Half an hour later, after driving through the little farming village of Rutter’s Fort, he pulled into the barnyard of a rundown farm and backed through the open doors of the barn. He closed the double doors behind him, and barred them from within. Then he went to the rear wall of the barn, which was much closer to the front than the outside dimensions of the barn would have indicated.
He took from his pocket a black object like an automatic pencil. Hunting over the rough plank wall, he found a small hole and inserted the pointed end of the pseudo-pencil, pressing on the other end. For an instant, nothing happened. Then a ten-foot-square section of the wall receded two feet and slid noiselessly to one side. The section which had slid inward had been built of three-inch steel, masked by a thin covering of boards; the wall around it was two-foot concrete, similarly camouflaged. He stepped quickly inside.
Fumbling at the right side of the opening, he found a switch and flicked it. Instantly, the massive steel plate slid back into place with a soft, oily click. As it did, lights came on within the hidden room, disclosing a great semiglobe of some fine metallic mesh, thirty feet in diameter and fifteen in height. There was a sliding door at one side of this; the man called Richard Lee opened and entered through it, closing it behind him. Then he turned to the center of the hollow dome, where an armchair was placed in front of a small desk below a large instrument panel. The gauges and dials on the panel, and the levers and switches and buttons on the desk control board, were all lettered and numbered with characters not of the Roman alphabet or the Arabic notation, and, within instant reach of the occupant of the chair, a pistollike weapon lay on the desk. It had a conventional index-finger trigger and a hand-fit grip, but, instead of a tubular barrel, two slender parallel metal rods extended about four inches forward of the receiver, joined together at what would correspond to the muzzle by a streamlined knob of some light blue ceramic or plastic substance.
The man with the handsome immobile face deposited his rifle and musette on the floor beside the chair and sat down. First, he picked up the pistollike weapon and checked it, and then he examined the many instruments on the panel in front of him. Finally, he flicked a switch on the control board.
At once, a small humming began, from some point overhead. It wavered and shrilled and mounted in intensity, and then fell to a steady monotone. The dome about him flickered with a queer, cold iridescence, and slowly vanished. The hidden room vanished, and he was looking into the shadowy interior of a deserted barn. The barn vanished; blue sky appeared above, streaked with wisps of high cirrus cloud. The autumn landscape flickered unreally. Buildings appeared and vanished, and other buildings came and went in a twinkling. All around him, half-seen shapes moved briefly and disappeared.
Once, the figure of a man appeared, inside the circle of the dome. He had an angry, brutal face, and he wore a black tunic piped with silver, and black breeches, and polished black boots, and there was an insignia, composed of a cross and thunderbolt, on his cap. He held an automatic pistol in his hand.
Instantly, the man at the desk snatched up his own weapon and thumbed off the safety, but before he could lift and aim it, the intruder stumbled and passed outside the force-field which surrounded the chair and instruments.
For a while, there were fires raging outside, and for a while, the man at the desk was surrounded by a great hall, with a high, vaulted ceiling, through which figures flitted and vanished. For a while, there were vistas of deep forests, always set in the same background of mountains and always under the same blue cirrus-laced sky. There was an interval of flickering blue-white light, of unbearable intensity. Then the man at the desk was surrounded by the interior of vast industrial works. The moving figures around him slowed, and became more distinct. Now the dome grew visible, coruscating with many-colored lights and then the humming died and the dome became a cold and inert mesh of fine white metal. A green light above flashed on and off slowly.
He stabbed a button and flipped a switch, then got to his feet, picking up his rifle and musette and fumbling under his shirt for a small mesh bag, from which he took an inch-wide disk of blue plastic. Unlocking a container on the instrument panel, he removed a small roll of solidograph-film, which he stowed in his bag. Then he slid open the door and emerged into his own dimension of space-time.
Outside was a wide hallway, with a pale green floor, paler green walls, and a ceiling of greenish off-white. A big hole had been cut to accommodate the dome, and across the hallway a desk had been set up, and at it sat a clerk in a pale blue tunic, who was just taking the audio-plugs of a music-box out of his ears. A couple of policemen in green uniforms, with ultrasonic paralyzers dangling by thongs from their left wrists and holstered sigma-ray needlers like the one on the desk inside the dome, were kidding with some girls in vivid orange and scarlet and green smocks.
“Here comes your boss-man,” one of the girls told the cops, as he approached. They both turned and saluted casually. The man who had lately been using the name of Richard Lee responded to their greeting and went to the desk. The policemen grasped their paralyzers, drew their needlers, and hurried into the dome.
Taking the disk of blue plastic from his packet, he handed it to the clerk at the desk, who dropped it into a slot in the voder in front of him. Instantly, a mechanical voice responded:
“Verkan Vail, blue-seal noble, hereditary Mavrad of Nerros. Special Chief’s Assistant, Paratime Police, special assignment. Subject to no orders below those of Tortha Karf, Chief of Paratime Police. To be given all courtesies and co-operation within the Paratime Transposition Code and the Police Powers Code. Further particulars?”
The clerk pressed the “no”-button. The blue sigil fell out the release-slot and was handed back to its bearer, who was drawing up his left sleeve.
“You’ll want to be sure I’m your Verkan Vail, I suppose?” he said, extending his arm.
“Yes, quite, sir.”
The clerk touched his arm with a small instrument which swabbed it with antiseptic, drew a minute blood-sample, and medicated the needle prick, all in one almost painless operation. He put the blood-drop on a slide and inserted it at one side of a comparison microscope, nodding. It showed the same distinctive permanent colloid pattern as the sample he had ready for comparison; the colloid pattern given in infancy by injection to the man in front of him, to set him apart from all the myriad other Verkan Vails on every other probability-line of paratime.
“Right, sir,” the clerk nodded.
The two policemen came out of the dome, their needlers holstered and their vigilance relaxed. They were lighting cigarettes as they emerged.
“It’s all right, sir,” one of them said. “You didn’t bring anything in with you, this trip.”
The other cop chuckled. “Remember that Fifth Level wild-man who came in on the freight conveyor at Jandar last month?” he asked.
If he was hoping that some of the girls would want to know what wild-man, it was a vain hope. With a blue-seal mavrad around, what chance did a couple of ordinary coppers have?
Verkan Vail turned to the clerk. “I want a strato-rocket and pilot for Dhergabar right away. Call Dhergabar Para time Police Field and give them my ETA; have an air-taxi meet me, and have the chief notified that I’m coming in. Extraordinary report. Keep a guard over the conveyor; I think I’m going to need it again, soon.” He turned to the little redhead. “Want to show me the way out of here to the rocket field?” he asked.
Outside, on the open landing field, Verkan Vail glanced up at the sky, then looked at his watch. It had been twenty minutes since he had backed the jeep into the barn on that distant other time-line; the same delicate lines of white cirrus were etched across the blue above. The constancy of the weather, even across two hundred thousand parayears of perpendicular time, never failed to impress him. The long curve of the mountains was the same, and they were mottled with the same autumn colors, but where the little village of Rutter’s Fort stood on that other line of probability, the white towers
of an apartment-city rose—the living quarters of the plant personnel.
The rocket that was to take him to headquarters was being hoisted with a crane and lowered into the firing-stand, and he walked briskly toward it, his rifle and musette slung. A boyish-looking pilot was on the platform, opening the door of the rocket; he stood aside for Verkan Vail to enter, then followed and closed it, dogging it shut while his passenger stowed his bag and rifle and strapped himself into a seat.
“Dhergabar Commercial Terminal, sir?” the pilot asked, taking the adjoining seat at the controls.
“Paratime Police Field, back of the Paratime Administration Building.”
“Right, sir. Twenty seconds to blast, when you’re ready.”
“Ready now.” Verkan Vail relaxed, counting seconds subconsciously.
The rocket trembled, and Verkan Vail felt himself being pushed gently back against the upholstery. The seats, and the pilot’s instrument panel in front of them, swung on gimbals, and the finger of the indicator swept slowly over a ninety-degree arc as the rocket rose and leveled. By then, the high cirrus clouds Verkan Vail had watched from the field were far below; they were well into the stratosphere.
There would be nothing to do now for the three hours in which the rocket sped northward across the pole and southward to Dhergabar; the navigation was entirely in the electronic hands of the robot controls. Verkan Vail got out his pipe and lit it; the pilot lit a cigarette.
“That’s an odd pipe, sir,” the pilot said. “Out-time item?”
“Yes, Fourth Probability Level; typical of the whole paratime belt I was working in.” Verkan Vail handed it over for inspection. “The bowl’s natural brier-root; the stem’s a sort of plastic made from the sap of certain tropical trees. The little white dot is the maker’s trademark; it’s made of elephant tusk.”
“Sounds pretty crude to me, sir.” The pilot handed it back. “Nice workmanship, though. Looks like good machine production.”
“Yes. The sector I was on is really quite advanced, for an electrochemical civilization. That weapon I brought back with me—that solid-missile projector—is typical of most Fourth Level culture. Moving parts machined to the closest tolerances, and interchangeable with similar parts of all similar weapons. The missile is a small bolt of cupro-alloy coated lead, propelled by expanding gases from the ignition of some nitro-cellulose compound. Most of their scientific advance occurred within the past century, and most of that in the past forty years. Of course, the life-expectancy on that level is only about seventy years.”
“Humph! I’m seventy-eight, last birthday,” the boyish-looking pilot snorted. “Their medical science must be mostly witchcraft!”
“Until quite recently it was,” Verkan Vail agreed. “Same story there as in everything else—rapid advancement in the past few decades, after thousands of years of cultural inertia.”
“You know, sir, I don’t really understand this paratime stuff,” the pilot confessed. “I know that all time is totally present, and that every moment has its own past-future line of event-sequence, and that all events in space-time occur according to maximum probability, but I just don’t get this alternate probability stuff at all. If something exists, it’s because it’s the maximum-probability effect of prior causes; why does anything else exist on any other time-line?”
Verkan Vail blew smoke at the air-renovator. A lecture on paratime theory would nicely fill in the three-hour interval until the landing at Dhergabar. At least, this kid was asking intelligent questions.
“Well, you know the principle of time-passage, I suppose?” he began.
“Yes, of course; Rhogom’s Doctrine. The basis of most of our psychical science. We exist perpetually at all moments within our life-span; our extraphysical ego component passes from the ego existing at one moment to the ego existing at the next. During unconsciousness, the EPC is ‘time-free’; it may detach, and connect at some other moment, with the ego existing at that time-point. That’s how we precog. We take an autohypno and recover memories brought back from the future moment and buried in the subconscious mind.”
“That’s right,” Verkan Vail told him. “And even without the autohypno, a lot of precognitive matter leaks out of the subconscious and into the conscious mind, usually in distorted forms, or else inspires ‘instinctive’ acts, the motivation for which is not brought to the level of consciousness. For instance, suppose you’re walking along North Promenade in Dhergabar, and you come to the Martian Palace Cafe, and you go in for a drink, and meet some girl, and strike up an acquaintance with her. This chance acquaintance develops into marriage and a year later you are killed in a rocket crash leaving her a widow.”
“Just about that happened to a friend of mine not long ago,” the pilot said. “Go on, sir.”
“Well, in the microsecond or so before you die—or afterward, for that matter, because we know that the extraphysical component survives physical destruction—your EPC slips back a couple of years, and re-connects at some point pastward of your first meeting with this girl, and carries with it memories of everything up to the moment of detachment, all of which are indelibly recorded in your subconscious mind. So, when you re-experience the event of standing outside the Martian Palace with a thirst, you go on to the Starway, or Nhergal’s, or some other bar. In both cases, on both time-lines, you follow the line of maximum probability; in the second case, your subconscious future memories are an added causal factor.”
“And when I back-slip, after I’ve been needled, I generate a new time-line? Is that it?”
Verkan Vail made a small sound of impatience. “No such thing!” he exclaimed. “It’s semantically inadmissible to talk about the total presence of time with one breath and about generating new time-lines with the next. All time-lines are totally present, in perpetual co-existence. The theory is that the EPC passes from one moment, on one time-line, to the next moment on the next line, so that the true passage of the EPC from moment to moment is a two-dimensional diagonal. So, in the case we’re using, the event of your going into the Martian Palace exists on one time-line, and the event of your passing along to the Starway exists on another, but both are events in real existence.
“Now, what we do in paratime transposition is to build up a hypertemporal field to include the time-line we want to reach, and then shift over to it. Same point in the plenum; same point in primary time—plus primary time elapsed during mechanical and electronic lag in the relays—but a different line of secondary time.”
“Then why don’t we have past-future time travel on our own time-line?” the pilot wanted to know.
That was a question every paratimer has to answer every time he talks para time to the laity. Verkan Vail had been expecting it; he answered patiently.
“The Ghaldron-Hesthor field-generator is like every other mechanism; it can operate only in the area of primary time in which it exists. It can transpose to any other time-line, and carry with it anything inside its field, but it can’t go outside its own temporal area of existence, any more than a bullet from that rifle can hit the target a week before it’s fired,” Verkan Vail pointed out. “Anything inside the field is supposed to be unaffected by anything outside. Supposed to be is the way to put it; it doesn’t always work. Once in a while, something pretty nasty gets picked up in transit.” He thought briefly of the man in the black tunic. “That’s why we have armed guards at terminals.”
“Suppose you pick up a blast from a nucleonic bomb,” the pilot asked, “or something red-hot, or radioactive?”
“We have a monument, at Paratime Police Headquarters, in Dhergabar, bearing the names of our own personnel who didn’t make it back. It’s a large monument; over the past ten thousand years it’s been inscribed with quite a few names.”
“You can have it; I’ll stick to rockets!” the pilot replied. “Tell me another thing though. What’s all this about levels, and sectors, and belts? What’s the difference?”
“Purely arbitrary terms. There are five main pro
bability levels, derived from the five possible outcomes of the attempt to colonize this planet, seventy-five thousand years ago. We’re on the First Level—complete success, and colony fully established. The Fifth Level is the probability of complete failure—no human population established on this planet, and indigenous quasi-human life evolved indigenously. On the Fourth Level, the colonists evidently met with some disaster and lost all memory of their extraterrestrial origin, as well as all extraterrestrial culture. As far as they know, they are an indigenous race; they have a long pre-history of stone-age savagery.
“Sectors are areas of paratime on any level in which the prevalent culture has a common origin and common characteristics. They are divided more or less arbitrarily into sub-sectors. Belts are areas within sub-sectors where conditions are the result of recent alternate probabilities. For instance, I’ve just come from the Europo-American Sector of the Fourth Level, an area of about ten thousand parayears in depth, in which the dominant civilization developed on the North-West Continent of the Major Land Mass, and spread from there to the Minor Land Mass. The line on which I was operating is also part of a sub-sector of about three thousand parayears’ depth, and a belt developing from one of several probable outcomes of a war concluded about three elapsed years ago. On that time-line, the field at the Hagraban Synthetics Works, where we took off, is part of an abandoned farm; on the site of Hagraban City is a little farming village. Those things are there, right now, both in primary time and in the plenum. They are about two hundred and fifty thousand parayears perpendicular to each other, and each is of the same general order of reality.”
