Warsaw 1943, and it is an insult to that city’s name that only this shard of it remains: its darkest hour, the last three months of the ghetto. Jewish and Polish resistance fighters, desperate and poorly armed, clashing with Nazi troops and collaborator police; a thousand plans of getting out, so few of which came to anything; an implacable enemy; the doom of utter annihilation hanging in the air. The only advantage to that terrible place was that we fit right in. No point in trying to hide, because every hidden part of that city was already crammed with the fearful.
“We can’t stay here long.” We’d got everyone into a shelter, the cellar of a collapsed house. There were a dozen families already there, pushed together, on top of one another. Starved, dirty faces stared at us, seeing our bizarre clothes, our mix of ethnicities, the fact that we were all far too well fed. They would all be dead, I knew. They were already dead. The Nazis would storm the ghetto as this fragment of time began to fail. Every one of these people had been preserved by that malevolent cripple, history, solely to suffer, to hope and fear, dread and die, over and over again.
“We need a proper sanctuary,” Ellie said. “There’s nothing I can see where we’d be safe hiding up. Someone has to make it to Comoy and get him to find us somewhere. We don’t have enough data here.”
“Can we even get someone to Comoy?” Marcus asked her.
“I have a path,” she confirmed. It was nineteen fragments long, skipping from time-piece to time-piece, in and out of history like a rat in the skirting, scant minutes to cross between the shards. We could never have got the children through it, probably not most of the adults. But then staying in Warsaw for any length of time was no better.
Time would be of the essence.
“I’ll do it.” And it was my creeping shame that courage did not motivate me. I could not face the end in Warsaw another time. I had seen it too often. The broken fragments of history have sharp edges.
Marcus nodded bluntly, and I looked over Ellie’s obstacle course. It was mostly out of recorded time, a worm-trail through monster-haunted spaces that man had no place travelling in.
My finger tracked to a projected five late Devonian minutes and I raised my eyebrow.
“Hold your breath,” said Ellie, and kissed me lightly on the cheek.
I walked the tops of glaciers when they ruled the world, huddling and hurrying in my too-thin clothes. I lurched from them into a desert that spanned the horizons, that could have been anywhere, save that in this time it was near everywhere. The sun tried to kill me; elsewhere it was pelycosaurs at my heels with their razor teeth. For one minute I walked the streets of Pompeii where the ash had yet to fall. The eruption would never come to this fragment, and yet its work had already been done. The locals were gone, removed entirely, not a living thing remaining. The enemy had been there. We had lost another crumb of our past.
I held my breath and ran through the uncertain Devonian, crushing liverworts beneath my feet, a pelting figure from a lost future dashing through the ferns and towering hands of fungus.
Ellie had plotted my escape well. She always did have the best head for it. Me? The only things I was really good at were running and hiding.
We had retained a lot of the Permian, snapped-off pieces of it scattered like stones across the broken substrate of time. Some of those fragments were years long, even centuries. They were harsh, dry times, the age before the dinosaurs, populated by starving monsters; each shard a memento of a time when all life on earth was sliding inexorably towards an extinction that would claim very nearly everything that lived. The world would know only one greater disaster, and that was ours. It was fitting that Doctor Comoy had made his home there, cycling between a dozen bestial, inhospitable fragments and taking his laboratory with him. Nobody else was permitted to set up in residence along the course of his peregrinations in case they got in his way. He was not a man fond of company, or of the human race much. He was its only hope, though, so it had no choice but to be fond of him.
Permian One was his migratory home, where he and his staff and guards were trying to start the clocks again. It was the hope of every lost, scattered, desperate soul who crept in and out of the fragments and scurried from era to era. Doc Comoy will fix it.
I believed. I thought I believed. I had lived all my life to that mantra. We will remake the world again, glue the fragments back into a whole. Somehow the misanthropic genius would save us all, give the universe CPR, turn back time.
I hadn’t been to Permian One in six years of personal time. My faith had sat at the back of my mind, comforting in its presence, never needing to be unsheathed. When I had talked with Marcus, the doubter, I had taken Comoy’s side, always. Of course he would succeed in fixing it all. What other alternative was there, that was worth the consideration?
I found his prefab compound exactly as before, that set of metal boxes that they took down and put up each time he moved his base to another piece of doomed Permian time. I went in, seeing the faces I remembered, his subordinate scientists, his guards, all their grim and drawn expressions, harried and weary just like before. Just like before, all of it. I think that was when it broke. My faith had sat back there for so long it had corroded into nothing, and when I tried to test it, it just broke.
Doctor Comoy himself was in his high chair, a cherry-picker affair that lifted him up and down the bank of screens that displayed the secrets of the universe, or at least those few pieces of it that we could still access. He was an old man now, older than last time, skin like sun-cracked leather, liver-spotted, pouchy about the eyes, sunken in about his cheeks. Old, he looked old but, other than that, I might as well have just left a moment before. Here was the saviour of the human race, the engineer of time.
I had the utter conviction, then, that nothing was being done, no progress was being made. Doc Comoy, after jury-rigging together the calculations that allowed the dozens of refugee bands to limp from timepiece to timepiece, had achieved nothing. In all of my life he had just been marking time.
I did not voice it. I could not have brought forward the maths to prove it. I could not shake the belief, though. I had a new faith, and it was pure nihilism.
I got out the problem, my band stranded in Warsaw’s darkness. I needed an exit, and I needed it yesterday. We had to get them out.
This small service he could provide, this prolonging of the end. His great computers and his greater mind gave me the path they must follow, and my own to get back to them. Even as I looked at the sequences, though, I was doubting them. Was this why even our precarious hold on time was breaking down? Was this why the enemy was winning?
Was Doctor Comoy fallible in everything? Were we just now seeing the inevitable disintegration of a system that he had not thought through?
I left Permian One. I had two hundred and fifty million years to cover and no time at all to do it in. I wove my way in and out of history, dodging cavemen and dinosaurs, revolutionaries and the Golden Horde. In my mind was the distant candle flame that was Warsaw, so soon to be snuffed out. I was always a runner, and I ran. Nobody could have made better use of time than I. I did not stop for man or beast or cataclysm.
And I was late. I was too late. Was I slow or were the calculations wrong? Perhaps it never had been possible, just as the long-term survival of all that we knew was only a dream. I arrived in Warsaw, but it was a different Warsaw. The fragment had ended and begun again, all the pieces, Jews and Poles and Nazis, reset on the board. And no Ellie, no Marcus, no Scarrows or Nguyen or the rest of them. I was too late.
They might have got out. Knowing the end was coming – of the ghetto and of time, one and then the other in a great wave of pain and fear and utter oblivion – perhaps they calculated an exit. Ellie was always good at the figures, after all. There were fragments they could have made – or Doc Comoy’s calculations said there were. Unless it was a lie.
Or perhaps the enemy had come and wiped them away, shot them and removed them from the ruptured track of history. Or
the Nazis had stormed the ghetto as they always did, and Ellie and the others had been just more corpses amongst so many, so very many.
Or the end had come, the real end, where time’s frayed edge caught up with them, and when the fragment began again they were gone, erased from time and space, made as if they never were.
In the ghetto, I knelt down and wept, screamed out my frustrations to the sky and shrugged off the attempts of those doomed and desperate people to comfort me.
I was alone, and Doc Comoy’s escape route was consigned to history. I sat there in the ruins and the ashes, amongst that other fugitive people, and did my own maths – not elegant Ellie maths, but my hamfisted imitation. I had to get out.
Even with nothing to get out for, a part of me wanted to live. Life has its own momentum. Ask the people in the Warsaw ghetto: no matter how bad it is, everyone wants to live.
It took me two years of my life, and I walked from one end of time to the other, but I made it back to Permian One. I hid in the Rome of the Medicis and cowered back from the wise, cold eyes of Neanderthals. I did what I did best: I ran, from the Mughals and the Zulus and the Iceni and Tyrannosaurus rex.
When at last I found the jump into the Permian fragment that the doctor was using, I saw it was true. Nothing had changed at all. He was older – they were all older, the clocks of their bodies marching on in ignorance of what had happened to wider time – but that was all. Oh, they were all busy, and there was the great impression of things being done, but I knew I was right. It was all a show, even if Doctor Comoy himself believed in it.
“They’re gone,” I told him, and from his expression he either did not know who I meant, or did not care.
That was when the enemy arrived.
I had never seen them properly before. I did not do so then, quite. They were humanoid, armoured, but what they were armoured in was proof against mere light as well as more violent measures. They shifted and warped and flickered and yet, at the same time, they were the most definite, concrete things in that complex. They were death, after all. There’s nothing more real than death.
Like death, they were patient hunters. They had been stalking me for a long time, following me from fragment to fragment, effortless in their transitions, whilst I scratched and strained at the mathematics. They had tried to hide from me, but I was too much of an experienced fugitive. I had known they were there.
I led them to Permian One. I led them to Doctor Comoy. It wasn’t as if I was doing anything else with my time. None of us were. That was the problem.
I had not known whether they were people at all, before that. They were the enemy, from before time broke, but I had thought they were no more than machines following the last orders of history. Until one spoke, I chose to believe that they were simple annihilators, the things that come at the end of the day, to close the shutters and put out the sun.
“Doctor Robert Comoy,” one of them said – impossible to tell which one, but it was a woman’s human voice, strong and stern. “You and your accomplices will be taken into custody for trial and disposal. Any attempt at escape will be met with force.”
The old man on his ridiculous high chair goggled down at them. “What are you doing?” his frail voice demanded. “Can’t you see I’m trying to put the world back together?”
“We are already restoring time,” the woman returned flatly. “The only thing standing between us and a unified timestream is the interference caused by the presence of you and your people. We cannot repair time with your vermin running riot amongst the pieces. You will either come with us and be rehabilitated, or you will be removed.”
Removed. She said it as though it had a capital letter: excised from time. Even then I could not have said whether it was true. Were they able to put the egg back together again? Were we the problem, rather than the solution?
Perhaps there was no solution.
Doctor Comoy was spitting, trying to force out words that were too big for the gape of his mouth, but then someone started shooting. Someone always starts shooting. Give a man a gun and he will want to use it. Perhaps that mentality is what caused this mess in the first place.
The enemy opened fire in return, beams of energy scorching and scouring whatever they touched. I wanted no part of it. Ellie and Marcus and the rest were gone, and I was on nobody’s side but my own.
I had my calculations already made. While they were fighting, while the enemy were triumphing over Doc Comoy and his wretched little Permian dream, I fled.
It had taken me long hours of patient calculation, but once I knew the enemy were content to follow me, I realized that I had time, for the first time in a long time, to get it right. There was a fragment of the Eocene, that dawn age after the extinction of all the old dinosaurs, that was three years long, and I stepped from the burning confusion of Comoy’s compound into a bright new day.
The enemy would hunt me. If what they said was true then I would gum up their works just by daring to exist. The Eocene was a big place, though, and running and hiding are what I’m good at, after all. As long as the enemy leave me fragments, I will find a hole to shelter in. I’ve the whole of my life ahead of me.
And when I’m old, when I’ve seen it all, that pitiful miscellany that is all that is left, perhaps I’ll go back to that cluttered London, if the enemy have left it. I’ll stand amongst the groundlings at the Curtain and listen to Will Kempe’s final routine, his farewell speech to all of creation. I’ll laugh out the end of the fragment into painless extinction, and let them save the universe.
But not yet. Not when I’m still using it. I’ve got a long way left to run.
THE GREAT CLOCK
Langdon Jones
Langdon Jones is an English short story writer, editor, and musician whose stories appeared in New Worlds. He was part of the New Wave of literary science fiction in the 1960s, along with Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard, M. John Harrison, and several others. “The Great Clock” was first published in New Worlds #160 in 1966 and later appeared in his short story collection The Eye of the Lens.
1
The light of the sky could be seen dimly through the small slits in the ceiling of the Great Chamber.
The Great Clock worked.
The Pendulum swung slowly in its giant arc and with every tick the whole Clock shuddered. The Great Wheel rose above the rest of the Clock mechanism in a great and static arc and the Fast Wheel whirled, humming, its sound rising above the noises made by the workings of the Clock. The other wheels turned at their various speeds, some smoothly, while some advanced one notch with every tick of the Clock. Pins engaged, wedges dropped, springs uncoiled. On the floor was thrown a shadow of wheels which formed an abstract pattern.
And the man sleeping naked on the pallet at the Posterior Wall stirred a little.
2
He was awakened by the whistle of the clock within the Clock.
It was fixed on one wall of the Great Chamber. It was made of wood and the sound of its ticking was lost in the constant sounds of the Great Clock. It was powered by a weight on a long chain, the other end of the chain having a metal loop through which projected the end of a lever coming through the wall. At this moment the lever, powered in some way by the Great Clock, was lowering itself smoothly, pulling down the free end of chain and winding up the clock. Below the clock, projecting upward from the floor was a four-foot metal flue pipe. The whistle was coming from this, a deafening note that was calling him to his duties. He covered his ears against the raucous sound. Eventually the note began to drop in volume and pitch, for a second broke down the octave to its fundamental, and then became quiet except for the hiss of escaping air. Behind the wooden wall could be heard intensive creaking as the giant bellows exhausted themselves.
The Clock ticked.
It was a thunderous sound, and it shook his body there on the pallet. It was a sound composed of a mosaic of sounds, some too high, others too low to be heard. But the high sounds irritated the eardrums and the low
ones stirred the bowels. The sounds that could be heard were a million. Metallic and wooden, high and low, muffled and clear, they all combined in a shattering rumble that made thought impossible. The tick was composed primarily of four separate groups of sound that peaked at intervals of about half a second. At the end of each tick, a creak from somewhere high in the building ran up the scale to silence.
When the echoes had died away he could hear the other sounds of the Clock. The whole Chamber was alive with noise. There were creakings all around; cogs met with metallic clashes; wooden parts knocked hollowly. From high in the Chamber on the opposite side to his pallet the Fast Wheel hummed loudly.
He opened his eyes. Light was filtering in dimly through the two tiny slits in the ceiling of the Great Chamber. He could see the black outlines of the Great Wheel where it vaulted overhead, partly obscured by a supporting column. He groaned, then sat up on the pallet, looking across toward the clock on the wall. The clock was made entirely of wood, and only one hand pointed toward the irregular marks scored around the edge of the dial. The marks indicated the times at which he had to perform his duties; they extended three-quarters round the face. When the hand reached any of the marks, the bellows, now filling slowly behind the wall, would drop a short distance and the metal flue pipe would give a short call. The hand was about five degrees from the first mark, and this gave him a short while to eat his breakfast. He wondered dully if there was a little man inside the wall-clock, just getting up, ready for his day’s work maintaining the mechanism.
The Time Traveller's Almanac Page 93
