Mind Out of Time

by Christopher Stasheff

  Right. Into the inside.

  So where's the outside? Yes—inside. And the inside is outside. And...

  You see the danger. If you really get contemplative and study a Klein bottle long enough, sooner or later you find yourself beginning to wonder if maybe your outside isn't really on your inside, and vice-versa, and...

  ...and the room seemed to be darkening around the Klein bottle, slowly, gradually, until only it remained. Then it darkened, too, and disappeared, leaving only darkness. Angus hung floating in a sea of night, surrounded by blackness shot through with concentric patterns of electric color, swelling and disappearing while new ones formed

  Angus took a deep breath and let calmness roll over the beginnings of fear. He'd learned meditation from an excellent teacher, but he knew he hadn't studied anywhere nearly long enough to be trying anything more. This far he'd been before, many times, and felt the familiar cold lump in the center of his being, the lump of fear and near-panic, pulsing there under a very thin blanket of tranquility. Maybe winning an argument wasn't so terribly important after all...

  Then he realized that he could see all around him—without turning his head. Before, behind, above, below... he could see everywhere; his peripheral vision encompassed a sphere.

  Fascinating!

  He forgot his panic.

  Now—how?

  How could he have wraparound vision without wraparound eyes? His fear submerged under the delight of a problem.

  He frowned pensively, lifting a hand to rub his chin...

  Nothing happened.

  Irritated, he sent the neural command to his hand again.

  Again, nothing happened.

  Angus clenched his jaw in annoyance. To be bothered with details, at a time like this...

  Then it hit him, and the cold of space shot through him. Not down his spine, just through him, like an arctic breeze through a fog—for he had no body.

  Fascinating!

  Angus tensed every muscle in his body, one by one.

  Nothing happened.

  He grinned. So that was why he couldn't lift a hand!

  Then he frowned, remembering something he'd heard about astral body travel. He didn't think that was what this was, but just in case, he imagined a string, imagined very hard—and it glimmered into being, from his heel all the way down to wherever his body was, where it joined with his body's heel. Just in case.

  Well, theory validated. So what else was new?

  Stars.

  The patterns around him faded, stabilized, and he found himself looking down on a string of lights, like a highway at night, a long line of glowing dots, strung out like streetlamps and, away off to the side of his vision, a dim glow, as though there were other lights over there, if he'd just turn and look...

  But one problem at a time. Angus frowned figuratively, chewed his mental lip thoughtfully. Let's see... he'd intended to travel in time, and he'd hoped the Klein bottle meditation would shoot him into another dimension, from which he could look down on Time as though it were a road map.

  Excellent. His subconscious had come through for him, providing him with that same analogy for a perceptual framework. Well done, Subconscious; he couldn't possibly have comprehended this Limbo as it really was.

  So. He was in another dimension. If (IF) Time was the Fourth Dimension, then he was in the Fifth... But the exact number didn't matter. He was in another dimension. Period.

  So why hadn't his body come along?

  Because it was three-dimensional.

  Then obviously, his mind wasn't. Very interesting.

  But scarcely vital. Back to the analogy.

  He looked down on the line of lights again. They, obviously, represented Time, and each light marked a given period—say, a year.

  He frowned, a sudden thought occurring to him. Slowly, he shifted his "visual" focus off to the side, toward that dim glow. There was another line of lights over there, angling toward his own. He followed it with his "vision," saw it converge and join with his own time-line a little way "back..."

  He'd heard about alternate universes, of course. That other line, then, would be the time-line of an alternate universe, and the point where it merged with his own universe's time-line would be the date of some huge cataclysmic event which had caused one time-line to split into two. Perhaps, in that alternate universe, the Third Reich ruled the world...

  Angus shuddered.

  Or maybe Adolph Hitler had died of influenza right after World War I.

  Suddenly an intense curiosity gripped Angus, the old craving for knowledge. Maybe a quick visit...

  But not right now. His thoughts veered back to the project at hand—going back in time about twenty thousand years.

  Okay, this was his native time-line. Which way was the past?

  Well, if time-lines split at major events and diverge, the two time-lines growing farther and farther apart as time goes by, then the point where they join is the past. Beyond the first junction he could see another time-line and, dimly beyond that, a third. Angus lifted his viewpoint and saw the time-lines spreading out like the branches of a tree—and where they came together they seemed like arrowheads pointing the way toward the past.

  He thought briefly of the future, decided regretfully that it would have to wait for tomorrow, and got down to the problem of travel.

  How do you move without a body?

  The people who dabbled in astral-body projection didn't seem to have much trouble—but they, at least, had bodies, albeit astral. This state Angus was in was clearly a totally different avian species. Experimentally, Angus thought of motion, imagined the lights below him moving, streaming past. After all, it was his analogy, wasn't it? So he ought to be able to manipulate it any way he wanted.

  But how far could he stretch that analogy?

  Well, he was going to find out soon. The lights below had begun to move.

  Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the time-lights below rushed past him, accelerating at an ever-increasing rate, becoming a blur—faster still, faster and faster, till the blur had become a single, solid bar of light. Universe junctions flicked past him as Angus shot back towards the Paleolithic.

  Angus had no way of figuring the date—but he did notice that universe-junctions became fewer and farther apart as he went back in time. With a little rapid figuring, he decided that the younger history became, the fewer cataclysms people would cause, which meant it would be the disruptions of Nature that would cause more and more universe-divergences.

  In other words, universes diverged only rarely until humanity began to become civilized.

  So as soon as the distance between junction points had became greater, Angus let himself sail on three-fourths of the way to the next major junction (which, he figured, just might be the human migration across the Bering Straits) and stopped.

  Now what?

  He frowned, chewing his imaginary lip. If he could manipulate his analogy any way he wanted...

  He imagined the stream of light-points flowing slowly under him until the exact date he wanted was directly below him.

  Again, the lights began to move—which meant, of course, that he was moving. He counted a hundred fifty-seven light-points going by, then...

  The string of lights stopped.

  Angus smiled, feeling a little smug. He hadn't been too far off, after all.

  He frowned at a sudden notion—this was all a little too easy. The chances of his choosing the right point on the first try were not exactly large. Could there be some other intelligence around, helping him, guiding him—for its own purposes?

  Angrily, he thrust the thought away, tried to forget the feeling of Antarctic cold that gripped him. How to get down? he thought firmly. How to get down?

  Well, it had worked so far, so...

  He imagined the point of light growing larger, moving up at him—and sure enough, it did!

  Again, he had the eerie sensation of some other mind guiding him as the light grew closer, b
ut thrust away the feeling with a snarl, then forgot it as the light-point seemed to reach out, pulling him into itself. Angus felt its tendrils touching him; there was a momentary sensation of falling, of being engulfed, pulled into—

  A Klein bottle.

  Before him sat a Klein bottle.

  Angus blinked, stupefied.

  Then his prefrontal lobes reasserted themselves. A Klein bottle? In the far past? Impossible!

  Obviously, then, he'd gone in the wrong direction; he had to be in the future.

  "No, you're in the middle of the last Ice Age."

  Angus jumped, felt his body lurch, and...

  Body?

  He looked down, feeling a head tilt on a neck—and saw a body.

  A body. Not his.

  Who it did belong to would be rather difficult to say—but, judging from the hair, the guy must be second cousin to a grizzly bear.

  "It ain't much, but it's all I've got."

  Angus jumped again, then glared around him. Whose voice...?

  "Mine," it answered. "Who're you?"

  "Angus McAran," Angus snapped. "Who..."

  "Doc!" The voice was jubilant. "Damn, it's good to hear you again! Been a hell of a long time! How you been doing?"

  "Oh, not bad, not bad at all," Angus muttered, a little dazed. "Work is getting a little heavy, haven't had any inspiration in a long time, but aside from... Hey! Hold on a minute!"

  "Okay. Sure." The voice sounded puzzled, maybe a little hurt.

  "All right." Angus took a deep breath. "Now. Who are you? And where am I?"

  He looked around again as he said it. He seemed to be sitting in a cave in front of the Klein bottle. A small fire crackled in the cave-mouth; beyond it was a starry sky over silver moonlight on a snowfield.

  But he didn't feel cold; there was a thick fur blanket over his shoulders. He fingered the robe, wondering how much of the fur was robe and how much was his body. "Also—what am I? And what the hell is that Klein bottle doing here?"

  The voice was cautious. "Uh... you don't remember, Doc?"

  "No, I don't remember!" Angus snapped. "And stop calling me 'Doc!'"

  "Oh." The voice was quiet a moment. Then, "You're not a Ph. D. yet?"

  "No! Absolutely not! And even if I were, you don't think I'd admit it, do you?"

  "Matter of fact, yes," the voice said cheerfully. "You're too honest not to."

  "How the hell would you know?"

  The voice was silent again; then, "Uh, Doc—is this your first time-trip?"

  "What do you mean, my first..." Angus made a choking sound, eyes bulging. "You mean..." He cleared his throat. "Oh... I'm going to do a little more time travel?"

  "You might say that, yes. Actually, you're going to organize GRIPE."

  "I've organized a lot of gripes already, and I don't mind letting people know about 'em. Is there going to be something new about this one?"

  "Uh, could you go a little lighter on the sarcasm, Doc?"

  "Don't call me 'Doc'!"

  "All right, all right, I'm sorry! Forgive my existence!" The voice took a long, patient breath. "Yeah, there is going to be something new about this GRIPE you're going to come up with, Do... uh, Angus. Uh, all right if I call you 'Angus'?"

  "Of course," Angus said impatiently. "Get on with it, will you? What's this new gripe of mine?"

  "Oh, yeah, that." The voice paused a moment. "Well, you see, GRIPE stands for 'Guardians of the Rights of Individuals, Patentholders Especially.'"

  Angus winced. "Who dreamed up that title?"

  "You did," the voice said promptly. "Or will, I should say—my past, your future. You know how it is."

  "Uh, yes." Angus didn't. "And, uh—just what kind of organization is this?"

  "Oh, it's a network of time-travelers."

  The cave was awfully silent for a minute.

  "Angus?" The voice sounded anxious. "Still there?"

  "Uh, sort of." Angus shook himself to disguise a shiver. "It seems I'm getting caught in my own network, doesn't it?"

  "Mmmm... interesting way of putting it," the voice said noncommittally. "Might be more valid, psychologically, than either of us would like to admit..."

  "Keep your validations out of my psychology," Angus snapped. "I suppose this means you're one of the time-travelers?"

  "Of course," said the voice. Then, contritely, "Sorry, Doc—I should have introduced myself earlier. I'm Alasper."

  "Alasper?" Angus frowned. "That sounds familiar."

  "It should; you named me... or will name me, I should say."

  "Maybe I won't," Angus growled. "Or do you think you can tell me what to do?"

  "Noooooo—just predicting..."

  "Comes to the same thing, doesn't it?"

  "Not at all, really," Alasper assured him. "You're going to decide to do it of your own free will."

  "How can it be my own free will if I've already been told I'm going to do it?"

  "How should I know?" Alasper sounded smug. "I'm just a time-agent, not a philosopher. Besides, your future self only told me the what, not the how or the why."

  "Sure you're not a philosopher?" But Angus's curiosity was up. "Uh, what's this future self of mine going to be like?"

  "Uh..." Alasper considered the question. Then: "Well, I can tell you this much, anyway: you're going to develop a sense of humor."

  "Me!!?!??"

  "Believe it or not. Why else do you think you named me 'Alasper'? Or gave me this last assignment, for that matter. And it's a real boffola, too—going on right now. Practical joke, of course—but it's the best you've ever come up with."

  "This, I could believe," Angus growled, "but I fail to appreciate the humor. Or is that just because we haven't gotten to the punch line yet?"

  "Uh, no, it's because you didn't hear the straight line. See, I'm a Neanderthal."

  Angus stared, astounded.

  Then a nasty suspicion began to creep up on him. He cleared his throat. "Uh—yes. A... Neanderthal."

  "The real thing," Alasper said modestly.

  "Um," Angus hedged. Then, "And this is, uh... Michigan?"

  "The Irish Hills, to be exact," Alasper confirmed. "'Course, the frost is a little thick right now."

  "Yes, of course. And may I ask what you, a Neanderthal, are doing in Southern Michigan?"

  "Well, that's where it gets funny."

  "So far I'm not laughing. What's the joke?"

  "The joke is me."

  "I might be inclined to agree, if I knew you a little better." Angus scowled. "So far, though, I am not amused."

  "Well, you bet me—excuse, you're going to bet me—that a Neanderthal couldn't make it from Prague to Detroit in less than twenty years."

  "I take it you won."

  "Hands down; I made it in ten. Then in l959, some professor is going to dig up my skull, and you're going to laugh yourself silly watching the anthropologists go into conniptions. Funny, no?"

  "Hilarious," Angus muttered. "So I doom you to a life of perpetual isolation just for a joke? I don't think I'm going to like me."

  "True," Alasper admitted. "But then, you never did. Don't worry on my account, though. Actually, you see, this is pretty late in the Pleistocene, and the Bering Straits migration is almost over. I come from a holdout pocket of Neanderthals up in the Alps—almost as much of a curiosity in Europe as I am in America."

  "And the Folsom-point people have worked their way down to Michigan by now?"

  "Yep. Their descendents will be the Huron Indians eventually, I suppose. That's going to be your doctoral dissertation, by the way."

  "Dissertation?" Angus looked up hungrily. "Doctorate?"

  "Yep. Something to do with electronic testing of prehistoric human remains—magnetic resonance or something. The Origin of the Wyandotte Nation, by Angus McAran, Ph.D."

  "Ph.D.," Angus echoed dreamily.

  Then he snapped out of it. "Ridiculous! I'm an engineer, not an anthropologist!"

  "Yeah, but this is the electronic proof of
genetic links."

  "Stuff and nonsense! Besides, what evidence would I have? I'm not about to go digging up twenty-thousand-year-old graves!"

  "No, you'll have ancient battle sites to excavate—anything that we'll bury for you to find for you to leak to anthropologists thirty thousand years from now."

  "Oh." Angus thought it over a moment. "Uh—a little unethical, isn't it?"

  "To analyze bodies that were abandoned on the battlefield? Probably not unethical, as long as you give them a decent burial when you're done—or have the current members of their nation do it, if you can be sure which people they're from."

  "No, no! ...Well, that too, of course. But I was thinking of you telling me where to find them."

  "Possibly," Alasper hedged, "but I don't think the academic community would believe you if you told them the truth."

  "That's not exactly new." Angus's lips pressed thin. "But even overlooking that, it doesn't change the fact that you wind up holding the bucket, 'a stranger and afraid...'"

  "Uh, before you get too maudlin," Alasper interrupted, "would it help any if I told you I'm not afraid?"

  "Not much," Angus growled. "I still leave you isolated."

  Alasper chuckled.

  Angus bristled. "What's that for?"

  "I'm not exactly alone," Alasper explained, amused.

  Then Angus felt his arm reach out to throw some twigs on the fire and panic surged in him. Someone else was controlling his body!

  But the twigs caught just then, and the fire flared, glowing warm on a golden face. Angus looked up...

  And caught his breath, eyes widening.

  Alasper chuckled again, softly.

  She was round-faced and Asian-featured—not Eskimo, not Indian, but something of both, with a large measure of Mongol thrown in. Her eyes were large, her lips full and generous, her skin golden. Black hair framed her face, billowing down to her lap in lush, full waves.

  "Pretty?" Alasper murmured.

  "Beautiful," Angus breathed.

  "Her tribe didn't think so." There was grim anger in Alasper's voice. "By their standards, she's scrawny, and too skinny-hipped to possibly bear a child. None of their men wanted her—so she came to the ugly, bestial stranger who fell in love with her. Me."

  Angus swallowed, with difficulty.

  "So don't fret your conscience, D... Angus. You had—will have—my interests at heart."