by Jimmy Guieu
Soon the spaceships reached another camp, not empty this time but inhabited by a tribe of around 150 monsters. The oldest ones, in a hut built after a fashion (a very crude fashion) with rectangular sheets of dried liana resembling hemp.
Most of the males were dozing, lying on the ground, heedless of the raucous cries of their offspring who were hopping around them. A few females were nursing babies the size of chimpanzees. When not on the hunt the hardy males rested while the older beasts and the females did all the work around the camp.
The ships’ hatches opened silently. One cyclops fitted with a parachute dropped into the tribe. On seeing one of their own falling out of the sky like this under a white crown, the monsters bowed down to the ground. Quite terrified, the red monster tumbled to the ground, got tangled in the parachute and struggled to get free. It did not know how to unfasten the straps and bindings but with herculean strength it ripped them apart, one after another, like a child ripping up a piece of paper.
Out of its shackles now it left the parachute behind and went roaring into the camp of its unknown brothers. Its arrival from the skies, totally unique in the annals of the cyclops, made a splash. This magical way of entering would earn it the respect of the other cyclops who had no trouble accepting it. Unfortunately for them this monster was a carrier of the NZ 14 germ that would, after three days of incubation, strike them down in 24 hours. Indeed, this contaminated creature would have time to spread his incurable, lethal, secret illness to the whole tribe in no time.
To be absolutely sure, the ships dropped microbe bombs all over the territory, from one tribe to the next. At the end of the day 27 cyclops had been parachuted into as many camps covering an area of around 8,000 square miles. The huge center of infection would be more than enough to spread the epidemic that would sound the death knell of all cyclops in Lemuria. The continent had been literally infested with germ bombs. Harmless to the Lemurians the NZ 14 germ would wreak deadly havoc among the monsters and exterminate their race in a few days.
Thus the Bimkamians, as real “Guardian Angels” of the not yet evolved planet, took control of the situation following the advice of Dr. Kariven and Professor Harrington. The Earth would soon be free of the perpetual threat posed by the cyclops, the monstrous product of a degenerate humanity.
When the incubation period was over the anticipated results passed all expectations.
The ground inhabited by the cyclops in the wild regions was turned into a ghastly mass grave. Hundreds of thousands of monsters died, struck down by the epidemic.
For two days the Bimkamian spaceships had to fly over the slaughter and disintegrate the rotting corpses that might have polluted the lakes and rivers from which the forest animals drank. Hundreds of tons of disinfectant were sprayed over the jungle, the swamps, the mountains and plains. Not an inch of land escaped their preventative actions.
The cyclops had had their day. At least if any rare survivors remained they would present no serious danger to men. Thus the deformed and phenomenal brood of one of Earth’s earliest human races disappeared.
Together in the cockpit of the Retro-timeship, Kariven and his friends were taking leave of Torka who had come to say goodbye. The Chief of Military Operations shook the hands of his Earthling friends and to Glanya, who had decided to go with them, he wished luck and happiness:
“I understand your desire to leave Shâmali where everything reminds you of your sister, whom you venerated so profoundly. You will be happy with Kurt Streiler and forget the pain and sorrow you lived through.”
The young Austrian engineer, with his arm around Glanya’s shoulder, respected her emotions.
Kariven communicated telepathically. “Goodbye, Torka. We’re continuing our voyage in Time and will visit epochs even earlier than yours. Then we’ll go back to the Present… I mean the Future according to you.”
Torka was sorry to leave his friends as he closed the hatch to their ship. He stopped in the middle of the astrodome and waved his arms, forcing a feeble smile for the Earthlings in the forward cockpit of the Space/Time machine. The Chief of Military Operations also sorely regretted the absence of Leyla. If this tragedy had not happened, she would be present at this farewell that might not be joyful but at least would be without this dread that gripped his throat.
The Retro-timeship rose slowly into the clouds.
In the center of the terrain Torka’s figure grew smaller and smaller.
Shâmali, the splendid Bimkamian city established on Earth, soon disappeared, abruptly, melting into a chaotic whirlwind. A gray void swept over the ship, which had just made another leap into the Time Spiral, even father back in the past of Earth.
Commander Taylor kept his eyes riveted on the illuminated screens of the chrome control panel, scrutinizing the movements of the needle marking their regression in Time.
Professor Harrington and Streiler were examining the rotation of a calibrated drum that rolled out a plastic ribbon on which were printed different numbers with the symbols plus and minus sometimes separated by vertical red stripes.
“This is the Physiotempograph showing a schematic of our travel,” Professor Harrington explained to Glanya. “The numbers represent millions of years before our Atomic Age, the divisions are hundreds of thousands and the subdivisions thousands. The part of the ribbon appearing now in light blue shows the chronological information of our stay in Shâmali, meaning the start of the Tertiary Period. The dark blue numbers are the days and in this case the 24 orange subdivisions represent the hours we spent with our Bimkamian friends…”
Kariven, lost in his dark thoughts, was not listening. The professor’s eyes shifted from him to Glanya, then settled on Streiler. The two scientists shook their heads sadly.
Wanting to pull him out of his grief, Professor Harrington tried to appeal to his scientific knowledge in anthropology and geology. “Tell me, Kariven, would you advise us to make a stopover in the Secondary or Primary?”
“Excuse me?” the young scientists was startled out of his ruminations.
The physicist obediently repeated his question.
“I suggest holding off on exploring the Secondary, though it’s terribly important, until later,” Kariven answered. “So we can ‘skip over’ this period and reach the very dawn of the Universe.”
Everyone supported his bold proposition. Without a moment’s hesitation Professor Harrington gave the necessary instructions to Commander Taylor. The American officer fiddled with his controls and adjusted the Physiotempograph. He engaged the retrogrador and then turned on the Space/Time viewer.
The Retro-timeship shuddered. The starry space visible on the screen transformed instantly into a gray twilight brighter than the usual gloom that accompanied the ship’s progress along the Time Spiral.
“This brightness of space around Earth,” Professor Harrington explained, “is due to our incredible speed on the one hand and to the increased light of the sun on the other. You know, I’m sure, that our sun, in its infancy, shined infinitely brighter than it does today. We’re flying back in time at a billion years per hour!”
“So, we’ll witness the birth of the Earth in around three hours,” Kariven remarked. “Most geologists and geophysicians believe our planet is around three billion years old. This estimate comes from the study of the oldest uranium deposits in the world, discovered in South Africa. Now, we know for sure that uranium takes five billion years to lose all of its radioactivity and transform into lead. In our universe, the Galaxy—or the Milky Way—was born at the same time” all its suns were born at the same minute! It’s agreed today that the other Galaxies—those astounding star clusters like the Milky Way—are moving away from a common, original center. The latest scientific discoveries have proven that these huge stellar archipelagos also started on the move three billion years ago10.”
Professor Harrington supported Kariven’s views and a passionate discussion followed, constantly fueled by questions from Glanya and Commander Taylor who were not so
familiar with these rather complex theories. Thus the three-hour voyage passed without the passengers realizing, being so caught up in the fascinating conversation.
It was Commander Taylor, always with an eye on the Physiotempograph’s feed, who finally announced, “Already? The temporal regressor is registering the programmed number. We’ve reached three billion years before our Age!”
“Stop!”
The American officer pressed various buttons and flipped some switches on the control panel, then he pulled a lever down on the Physiotempograph and the Retro-timeship immediately dragged to a halt. It vibrated quietly, rocked lightly backed and forth but gradually regained its stability.
The light gray of space had disappeared.
Through the dome of the cockpit the time explorers struggled to see something but to no avail. The Universe was invisible because it was not yet born!
Outside the ship was nothing but inky dark, a frightening blackness, a total void beyond imagination.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, to be used as a point of reference, a system of reference.
The first lines of the Bible came to Kariven’s mind: In the beginning darkness was upon the face of the deep.
The Earthlings had reached Zero Age, the absolute void, the Non-Time that preceded the World.
Choked up, panting, full of indescribable emotions, the explorers looked at one another. A shiver of dread ran down their spines. Facing this void, this blackness, or rather this absence of Everything, their reason failed.
Is man made to know the secrets of the Universe? Can he probe with impunity the inner workings of Time, Space and the Great Mystery that precedes the ages?
Commander Taylor nervously wiped his sweaty forehead and gulped loudly. “What do we do, Professor?” he asked awkwardly.
Without answering, Professor Harrington reached hesitatingly for the Physiotempograph and slowly turned a calibrated knob. The Retro-timeship vibrated again, lightly, and hummed softly.
All of a sudden on the screen that visualized the images that were unseen by the naked eye, a faint glimmer, a tiny point showed up in the dreadful dark of empty space. Professor Harrington’s fingers gently turned the knob of the Physiotempograph to speed up a little the voyage through the void. The hazy spot grew clear, a pale halo on the flat black background.
“Time is beginning,” the physicist panted, his eyes riveted on the mysterious point, becoming visible to the eye now that it was acclimated to the darkness.
Gradually the eerie glimmer became a perfectly round ball, hardly brighter than a very distant beacon light softened by a thick fog. In a few minutes this ball changed into a puffed up globe filling up more and more space, although no brighter in its pale phosphorescence. Its mysterious mass took the form of a nebulous sphere on its axis. The gaseous but compact cluster, with its unimaginable density, could have contained the volume of the solar system such as the Earthlings knew.
“That’s the Initial Atom! The Egg of the Universe! Its temperature was 20 billion degrees!”11 Kariven gasped as his eyes scanned the space that was starting to illuminate, very faintly, the extraordinary star.
The expanding mass started turning on itself, slowly at first, then faster and faster. A kind of radio luminosity grew out of the center of the “ball” as if coming from its core. Little by little the globe swelled up, its poles flattened out as it turned into a kind of nebulous circle, a monstrous pancake with a phosphorescent core, measuring billions of miles across.
All of a sudden the Initial Atom burst. It exploded with such violence that the H-bomb looked like a harmless little firecracker in comparison. The cosmic explosion was awful, unthinkable, beyond the wildest imagination.
In a few minutes the gigantic Initial Atom, relatively murky, fragmented into billions of incandescent clouds that spun off from one another. It was like a fantastic downfall of snowflakes glimmering in the rays of an invisible sun and soaring off over the black background.
“These rotating masses that are flying off in all directions,” Kariven commented, “will become the nebulae that make up the whole Universe.”
“But how are we going to recognize our Galaxy in this impossible chaos, in this flood of cosmic clouds from which the other galaxies are born?” Glanya asked, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the sight.
“Patience,” Professor Harrington advised as he increased the speed of the Physiotempograph.
Kariven continued, “Everything we just saw is the very image of creation. And creation lasted only one hour.12 From the explosion of the Initial Atom, the Egg of the Universe, up to the distribution of the masses of matter before forming the nebulae later on, barely 60 minutes went by.”
Out of the huge swarm in the center of the chaos of billions of budding nebulae a shapeless cloud drifted toward the Retro-timeship.
“There’s the answer to your question, Glanya,” Professor Harrington said. “Our ship stopped at the farthest edge of the Time Spiral. The Earth, therefore, wasn’t visible because it was still one with the Initial Atom. But when it’s born, it will materialize in the exact spot where the ship is now. The creation of the Earth can’t happen anywhere else but ‘under’ this spot where we are. My deductions are strictly logical and mathematical. Therefore, we can’t get lost in the chaos. It’s not the ship that’s moving now but the Earth—or rather the solar system—that’s coming to us by starting its spiral path toward the Apex.”
“You mean… you mean to say that this spinning mass heading for us will become the Milky Way? So, from a fragment of this cosmic ‘ball’ our solar system will be born?”
“Exactly. Just keep your eye on the screen,” he continued watching and accelerating the Retro-timeship’s forward motion through Time.
The ship leaped into the Time Spiral and the surrounding darkness suddenly changed into a lighter shade, embellished with milky white and some red spots that danced on their viewer.
“The nebulae are still moving away and the Universe is taking shape. The cloud of cosmic matter that was heading toward us is now our Galaxy. Without realizing it we are already in the Milky Way at the start of its creation. The bright ball you saw earlier has finally condensed, then exploded into the Galaxy to give birth to new spinning clusters that are roughly spherical—the future planets of the solar system. And there’s Earth at its birth…”
One of the shining, spinning stars was oscillating in space in front of the astounded eyes of the spectators. Professor Harrington carefully turned the Physiotempograph’s knob once again. The terrestrial globe diminished. Its reddish surface darkened and the embryonic continents started floating on a sea of viscous matter that was, in parts, on fire.
Our planet was semi-liquid then and was cooling down while spinning faster and faster. The acceleration of its rotation along with the attraction of the sun deformed its mass, which under the opposing forces became slightly oval. By a similar effect of the tides a “suction” of seas and continents rose up as a star passed by.
Thanks to the exceptional possibilities of the Retro-timeship traveling through the course of ages, the evolution of our planet looked like it was on fast-forward. The small end of the terrestrial “egg” stretched out, became spindle-shaped, then suddenly broke off from the Earth in a flaming apocalypse. Shreds of fusing matter fell back into the fiery gulf left on the surface of the forming planet while the detached part of the Earth’s crust flew off into space.
After several days—a few seconds for the explorers—this fragment of Earth slowly started spinning around and became… the Moon!13
Our friends stood agape. This fantastic evolution was as delightful as it was frightening.
Lost in contemplation of the dawn of the World, Kariven finally broke the silence, “See there on the surface of the Earth that’s still cooling down that hollow part left by the Moon casting off into space? By changing slowly this gulf will become the Pacific Ocean. In fact, the Pacific is surrounded by high mountains including a bunch of volcanoes—the ring o
f fire of geophysicists. They are the splinters left by the Moon when it broke away from the Earth14.
“Our globe will continue to cool down; the continents will stop temporarily on their geological foundations; the meteor storms and floods that rained down on the nascent world will lose their magnitude and one day, after the atmosphere forms, which will filter the harsh rays of the sun, life will be born at the bottom of the oceans. The first signs of life will begin in the seas with the Lymph and protoplasm. These two entities, after a slow evolution made up of mutations and transformations, will end up as man, the king of creation, the crowning achievement of hundreds of millions, maybe billions of years since the cosmobiologists and paleontologists think that life was born at this distant epoch.”
“This ‘film’ of the birth of the World was really impressive,” Glanya acknowledged. “It makes me want to see it end up with all its various animal and vegetal life forms closer to us…”
“I’m anxious too,” Streiler seconded. “The vision of the initial chaos left a mark on us and I think it’d be good to visit a later age… An age when we won’t feel like such ‘intruders’…”
“That would be good,” Kariven agreed. “Let’s leave behind the Primary and its infancy. This calls for exploring the Secondary Period… and it might surprise us because this age was marked by the famous Gondwana continent. After a cataclysm, the continent produced part of Lemuria, which we just visited. Gondwana and Lemuria have common geological foundations. The cataclysm dates back to around 100 million years ago. Therefore, we have to go into Time at a point after this to get in contact with the future Gondwanian civilization that we really know nothing about. Science even categorically denies its existence. And we can’t blame it because we have, in fact, no trace, not the slightest material vestige of this hypothetical civilization except for some animal and plant fossils that have nothing to do with a thinking species.
