The Time Traveller's Almanac

by Ann VanderMeer

  Leigh made no move to summon him back. There followed a long silence. By now the train was still less than a mile away and had cut progress down to about one yard per minute. Finally it stopped, remained motionless for a quarter of an hour, began to back so gradually that it had inched twenty yards before watchers became certain that it had reversed direction. Leigh levelled powerful glasses upon it. Definitely it was returning to the base of the bluff.

  “Funny thing here,” bawled Ogilvy from the wall. “Streets full of people all struck stiff. It was the same in those villages now that I come to think of it. I went over them too fast for the fact to register.”

  “That’s crazy,” said Pascoe. “How can he tell from that height?”

  “I’m hovering right over the main stem, a tree-lined avenue with crowded sidewalks,” Ogilvy continued. “If anyone is moving, I can’t detect it. Request permission to examine from five hundred.”

  Using the auxiliary mike linked through the signals room, Leigh asked, “Is there any evidence of opposition such as aircraft, gun emplacements or rocket pits?”

  “No, commodore, not that I can see.”

  “Then you can go down but don’t drop too fast. Sheer out immediately if fired upon.”

  Silence during which Leigh had another look outside. The train was continuing to come back at velocity definable as chronic. He estimated that it would take most of an hour to reach the nearest point.

  “Now at five hundred,” the loudspeaker declared. “Great Jupiter, I’ve never seen anything like it. They’re moving all right. But they’re so sluggish I have to look twice to make sure they really are alive and in action.” A pause, then, “Believe it or not, there’s a sort of street-car system in operation. A baby eighteen months old could toddle after one of those vehicles and catch it.”

  “Come back,” Leigh ordered sharply. “Come back and report on the nearby town.”

  “As you wish, commodore.” Ogilvy sounded as if he were obeying with reluctance.

  “Where’s the point of withdrawing him from there?” asked Pascoe, irritated by this abrupt cutting-off of data. “He’s in no great danger. What will he learn from one place that he cannot get from another?”

  “He can confirm or deny the thing that is all-important, namely, that conditions are the same elsewhere and are not restricted to one locale. When he’s had a look at the town I’ll send him a thousand miles away for a third and final check.” His grey eyes were thoughtful as he went on, “In olden times a Martian visitor could have made a major blunder if he’d judged Earth by one of its last remaining leper colonies. Today we’d make precisely the same mistake if this happens to be a quarantined area full of native paralytics.”

  “Don’t say it,” put in Walterson, displaying some nervousness. “If we’ve sat down in a reservation for the diseased, we’d better get out mighty fast. I don’t want to be smitten by any alien plague to which I’ve no natural resistance. I had a narrow enough escape when I missed that Hermes expedition six years ago. Remember it? Within three days of landing the entire complement was dead, their bodies growing bundles of stinking strings later defined as a fungus.”

  “We’ll see what Ogilvy says,” Leigh decided. “If he reports what we consider more normal conditions elsewhere, we’ll move there. If they prove the same, we’ll stay.”

  “Stay,” echoed Pascoe, his features expressing disgust. “Something tells me you picked the right word – stay.” He gestured toward the port beyond which the train was a long time coming. “If what we’ve seen and what we’ve heard has any meaning at all, it means we’re in a prize fix.”

  “Such as what?” prompted Walterson.

  “We can stay a million years or go back home. For once in our triumphant history we’re well and truly thwarted. We’ll gain nothing whatever from this world for a good and undefeatable reason, namely, life’s too short.”

  “I’m jumping to no hasty conclusions,” said Leigh. “We’ll wait for Ogilvy.”

  In a short time the loudspeaker informed with incredulity: “This town is full of creepers, too. And trolleys making the same speed, if you can call it speed. Want me to go down and tell you more?”

  “No,” said Leigh into the mike. “Make a full-range sweep eastward. Loop out as far as you can go with safety. Watch especially for any radical variation in phenomena and, if you find it, report at once.” He racked the microphone, turned to the others. “All we can do now is wait a bit.”

  “You said it!” observed Pascoe pointedly. “I’ll lay odds of a thousand to one that Boydell did no more than sit futilely around picking his teeth until he got tired of it.”

  Walterson let go a sudden laugh that startled them.

  “What’s the matter with you?” demanded Pascoe, staring at him.

  “One develops the strangest ideas sometimes,” said Walterson apologetically. “It just occurred to me that if horses were snails they’d never be compelled to wear harness. There’s a moral somewhere but I can’t be bothered to dig it out.”

  “City forty-two miles eastward from base,” called Ogilvy. “Same as before. Two speeds: dead slow and slower than dead.”

  Pascoe glanced through the port. “That train is doing less than bug-rate. I reckon it intends to stop when it gets here.” He thought a bit, finished, “If so, we know one thing in advance: they aren’t frightened of us.”

  Making up his mind, Leigh phoned through to Shallom. “We’re going outside. Make a record of Ogilvy’s remarks while we’re gone. Sound a brief yelp on the alarm-siren if he reports rapid movement any place.” Then he switched to Nolan, Hoffnagle and Romero, the three communications experts. “Bring your Keen charts along in readiness for contact.”

  “It’s conventional,” reminded Pascoe, “for the ship’s commander to remain in control of his vessel until contact has been made and the aliens found friendly or, at least, not hostile.”

  “This is where convention gets dumped overboard for once,” Leigh snapped. “I’m going to pick on the load in that train. It’s high time we made some progress. Please yourselves whether or not you come along.”

  “Fourteen villages so far,” chipped in Ogilvy from far away over the hills. “Everyone in them hustling around at the pace that kills – with boredom. Am heading for city visible on horizon.”

  The communicators arrived bearing sheafs of coloured charts. They were unarmed, being the only personnel forbidden to wear guns. The theory behind this edict was that obvious helplessness established confidence. In most circumstances the notion proved correct and communicators survived. Once in a while it flopped and the victims gained no more than decent burial.

  “What about us?” inquired Walterson, eyeing the newcomers. “Do we take weapons or don’t we?”

  “We’ll chance it without any,” Leigh decided. “A life form sufficiently intelligent to trundle around in trains should be plenty smart enough to guess what will happen if they try to take us. They’ll be right under the ship’s guns while we’re parleying.”

  “I’ve no faith in their ability to see reason as we understand it,” Pascoe put in. “For all their civilized veneer they may be the most treacherous characters this side of Sirius.” Then he grinned and added, “But I’ve faith in my legs. By the way these aliens get into action I’d be a small cloud of dust in the sunset before one of them could take aim.”

  Leigh smiled, led them through the main lock. Every port was filled with watching faces as they made their way down to the track.

  Gun-teams stood ready in their turrets, grimly aware that they could not beat off an attempted snatch except at risk of killing friends along with foes. But if necessary they could thwart it by wrecking the rails behind and ahead of the train, isolating it in readiness for further treatment. For the time being their role was the static one of intimidation. Despite this world’s apparent lack of danger there was a certain amount of apprehension among the older hands in the ship. A pacific atmosphere had fooled humans before and they were
wary of it.

  The six reached the railroad a couple of hundred yards in advance of the train, walked toward it. They could see the driver sat behind a glass-like panel in front. His big yellow eyes were staring straight ahead, his crimson face was without expression. Both his hands rested on knobbed levers and the sight of half-a-dozen other-worlders on the lines did not make him so much as twitch a finger.

  Leigh was first to reach the cab door and stretch out a hand to grasp incurable difficulty number one. He took hold of the handle, swung the door open, put a pleasant smile upon his face and uttered a cordial “Hello!”

  The driver did not answer. Instead, his eyeballs began to edge round sidewise while the train continued to pelt along at such a rate that it started pulling away from Leigh’s hand. Perforce, Leigh had to take a step to keep level. The eyes reached their corners by which time Leigh was compelled to take another step. Then the driver’s head started turning. Leigh took a step. More turn. Another step. Behind Leigh his five companions strove to stay with them. It wasn’t easy. In fact it was tough going. They could not stand still and let the train creep away. They could not walk without getting ahead of it. The result was a ludicrous march based on a hop-pause rhythm with the hops short and the pauses long.

  By the time the driver’s head was halfway round, the long fingers of his right hand had started uncurling from the knob it was holding. At the same overstretched instant the knob commenced to rise on its lever. He was doing something, no doubt of that. He was bursting into action to meet a sudden emergency.

  Still gripping the door, Leigh edged along with it. The others went hop-pause in unison. Pascoe wore the pained reverence of one attending the tedious funeral of a rich uncle who has just cut him out of his will.

  Imagination told Leigh what ribald remarks were being tossed around among the audience in the ship.

  He solved the problem of reclaiming official dignity by the simple process of stepping into the cab. That wasn’t much better, though. He had avoided the limping procession but now had the choice of standing half-bent or kneeling on the floor.

  Now the driver’s head was right round, his eyes looking straight at the visitor. The knob had projected to its limit. Something that made hissing noises under the floor went silent and the train’s progress was only that of its forward momentum against the brakes. A creep measurable in inches or fractions of an inch.

  “Hello!” repeated Leigh, feeling that he had never voiced a sillier word.

  The driver’s mouth opened to a pink oval, revealed long, narrow teeth but no tongue. He shaped the mouth and by the time he’d got it to his satisfaction the listener could have smoked half a cigarette. Leigh perked his ears for the expected greeting. Nothing came out, not a sound, a note, a decibel. He waited a while, hoping that the first word might emerge before next Thursday. The mouth made a couple of slight changes in form while pink palps at the back of it writhed like nearly-dead worms. And that was all.

  Walterson ceased ultra-slow mooching on the tangled clover and called, “It has stopped, commodore.”

  Stepping backward from the cab, Leigh shoved hands deep into pockets and gazed defeatedly at the driver whose formerly blank face was now acquiring an expression of surprised interest. He could watch the features registering with all the lackadaisical air of a chameleon changing colour, and at about the same rate.

  “This is a hell of a note,” complained Pascoe, nudging Leigh. He pointed at the row of door handles projecting from the four cars. Most of them had tilted out of the horizontal and were moving a degree at a time toward the vertical. “They’re falling over themselves to get out.”

  “Open up for them,” Leigh suggested.

  Hoffnagle, who happened to be standing right by an exit, obligingly twisted a handle and lugged the door. Out it swung complete with a clinging passenger who hadn’t been able to let go. Dropping his contact charts, Hoffnagle dexterously caught the victim, planted him on his feet. It took forty-eight seconds by Romero’s watch for this one to register facial reaction, which was that of bafflement.

  After this, doors had to be opened with all the caution of a tax collector coping with a mysterious parcel that ticks. Pascoe, impatient as usual, hastened the dismounting process by lifting aliens from open doorways and standing them on the greensward. The quickest-witted one among the lot required a mere twenty-eight seconds to start mulling the problem of how he had passed from one point to another without crossing intervening space. He would solve that problem – given time.

  With the train empty there were twenty-three Waitabits hanging around. None exceeded four feet in height or sixty pounds Eterna-weight.

  All were well-clothed in manner that gave no clue to sex. Presumably all were adults, there being no tiny specimens among them. Not one bore anything remotely resembling a weapon.

  Looking them over Leigh readily conceded that no matter how sluggish they might be they were not dopey. Their outlandishly coloured features held intelligence of a fairly high order. That was already self-evident from the tools they made and used, such as this train, but it showed in their faces, too.

  The Grand Council, he decided, had good cause for alarm in a way not yet thought of by its members. If the bunch standing before him were truly representative of their planet, then they were completely innocuous.

  They embodied no danger whatsoever to Terran interests anywhere in the cosmos. Yet, at the same time, they implied a major menace of which he hated to think.

  With their easily comprehensible charts laid out on the ground the three communicators prepared to explain their origin, presence and purposes by an effective sign-and-gesture technique basic for all first contacts. The fidgety Pascoe speeded up the job by arranging Waitabits in a circle around the charts, picking them up like so many lethargic dolls and placing them in position.

  Leigh and Walterson went to have a look at the train. If any of its owners objected to this inspection, they didn’t have enough minutes in which to do something about it.

  The roofs of all four cars were of pale yellow, transparent plastic extending down the sides to a line flush with the door-tops. Beneath the plastic lay countless numbers of carefully-arranged silicon wafers. Inside the cars, beneath plates forming the centre aisles, were arrays of tiny cylinders rather like nickel-alloy cells. The motors could not be seen, they were hidden beneath small driving-cabs of which there was one to each car.

  “Sun power,” said Leigh. “The prime motive force is derived from those solar batteries built into the roofs.” He paced out the length of a car, made an estimate. “Four feet by twenty apiece. Including the side-strips, that’s six-forty square feet of pickup area.”

  “Nothing marvellous about it,” ventured Walterson, unimpressed. “They use better ones in the tropical zones of Earth and have similar gadgets on Dramonia and Werth.”

  “I know. But here the night-time lasts six months. What sort of storage batteries will last that long without draining? How do they manage to get around on the night-side? Or does all transport cease while they snore in bed?”

  “Pascoe could make a better guess at their boudoir habits. For what it’s worth, I’d say they sleep, six months being to them no more than a night is to us. Anyway, why should we speculate about the matter? We’ll be exploring the night-side sooner or later, won’t we?”

  “Yes, sure. But I’d like to know whether this contraption is more advanced in any single respect than anything we’ve got.”

  “To discover that much we’d have to pull it to pieces,” Walterson objected. “Putting Shallom and his boys on a wrecking job would be a lousy way of maintaining friendship. These Waitabits wouldn’t like it even though they can’t stop us.”

  “I’m not that ham-handed,” Leigh reproved. “Apart from the fact that destruction of property belonging to non-hostile aliens could gain me a court-martial, why should I invite trouble if we can get the information from them in exchange for other data? Did you ever hear of a genuinely intellig
ent Me form that refused to swap knowledge?”

  “No,” said Walterson. “And neither did I ever hear of one that took ten years to pay for what it got in ten minutes.” He grinned with malicious satisfaction, added, “We’re finding out what Boydell discovered, namely, that you’ve got to give in order to receive – and in order to receive you’ve got to wait a bit.”

  “Something inside of me insists that you’re dead right.” Leigh shrugged and went on, “Anyway, that’s the Council’s worry. Right now we can do no more until the contact men make their report. Let’s get back to the ship.”

  They mounted the bluff. Seeing them go, Pascoe hastened after them, leaving the trio of communicators to play with Keen charts and make snakes of their arms.

  “How’s it going?” Leigh inquired as they went through the lock.

  “Not so good,” said Pascoe. “You ought to try it yourself. It would make you whirly.”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “How can you synchronize two values when one of them is unknown? How can you make rhythm to a prolonged and completely silent beat? Every time Hoffnagle uses the orbit-sign he is merely demonstrating that the quickness of the hand deceives the eye so far as the audience is concerned. So he slows, does it again and it still fools them. He slows more.” Pascoe sniffed with disgust. “It’s going to take those three luckless characters all of today and maybe most of a week to find, practise and perfect the quickest gestures that register effectively. They aren’t teaching anybody anything – they’re learning themselves. It’s time-and-motion study with a vengeance.”

  “It has to be done,” Leigh remarked quietly. “Even if it takes a lifetime.”

  “Whose lifetime?” asked Pascoe, pointedly.

  Leigh winced, sought a satisfactory retort, failed to find one.

  At the corner of the passageway Garside met them. He was a small, excitable man whose eyes looked huge behind thick spectacles. The great love of his life was bugs, any size, shape, colour or origin so long as they were bugs.