Off The Main Sequence

by Robert A. Heinlein

  A cautious reconnoiter of the small part of the palace with which he was acquainted turned up no human beings or life of any sort, not even insect life. The place was dead, sterile, as static and unlived-in as a window display. He shouted once just to hear a voice. The echoes caused him to shiver; he did not do it again.

  The architecture of the place confused him. Not only was it strange to his experience — he had expected that — but the place, with minor exceptions, seemed totally unadapted to the uses of human beings. Great halls large enough to hold ten thousand people at once — had there been floors for them to stand on. For there frequently were no floors in the accepted meaning of a level or reasonably level platform. In following a passageway he came suddenly to one of the great mysterious openings in the structure and almost fell in before he realized that his path had terminated. He crawled gingerly forward and looked over the edge. The mouth of the passage debouched high up on a wall of the place; below him the wall was cut back so that there was not even a vertical surface for the eye to follow. Far below him, the wall curved back and met its mate of the opposite side — not decently, in a horizontal plane, but at an acute angle.

  There were other openings scattered around the walls, openings as unserviceable to human beings as the one in which he crouched. “The High Ones," he whispered to himself. All his cockiness was gone out of him. He retraced his steps through the fine dust and reached the almost friendly familiarity of the Hall of the Gate.

  On his second try he attempted only those passages and compartments which seemed obviously adapted to men. He had already decided what such parts of the palace must be — servants’ quarters, or, more probably, slaves’ quarters. He regained his courage by sticking to such areas. Though deserted completely, by contrast with the rest of the great structure a room or a passage which seemed to have been built for men was friendly and cheerful. The sourceless ever-present illuminations and the unbroken silence still bothered him, but not to the degree to which he had been upset by the gargantuan and mysteriously convoluted chambers of the “High Ones."

  He had almost despaired of finding his way out of the palace and was thinking of retracing his steps when the corridor he was following turned and he found himself in bright sunlight.

  He was standing at the top of a broad steep ramp which spread fanlike down to the base of the building. Ahead of him and below him, distant at least five hundred yards, the pavement of the ramp met the green of sod and bush and tree. It was the same placid, lush and familiar scene he had looked out over when he breakfasted with Diktor — a few hours ago and ten years in the future.

  He stood quietly for a short time, drinking in the sunshine, soaking up the heart-lifting beauty of the warm, spring day. “This is going to be all right," he exulted. “It’s a grand place."

  He moved slowly down the ramp, his eyes searching for human beings. He was halfway down when he saw a small figure emerge from the trees into a clearing near the foot of the ramp. He called out to it in joyous excitement. The child — it was a child he saw — looked up, stared at him for a moment, then fled back into the shelter of the trees.

  “Impetuous, Robert — that’s what you are," he chided himself. “Don’t scare 'em. Take it easy." But he was not made downhearted by the incident. Where there were children there would be parents, society, opportunities for a bright, young fellow who took a broad view of things. He moved on down at a leisurely pace.

  A man showed up at the point where the child had disappeared. Wilson stood still. The man looked him over and advanced hesitantly a step or two. “Come here!" Wilson invited in a friendly voice. “I won’t hurt you."

  The man could hardly have understood his words, but he advanced slowly. At the edge of the pavement he stopped, eyed it and would not proceed farther.

  Something about the behavior pattern clicked in Wilson’s brain, fitted in with what he had seen in the palace and with the little that Diktor had told him. “Unless," he told himself, “the time I spent in 'Anthropology I’ was totally wasted, this palace is tabu, the ramp I’m standing on is tabu, and, by contagion, I’m tabu. Play your cards, son, play your cards!"

  He advanced to the edge of the pavement, being careful not to step off it. The man dropped to his knees and cupped his hands in front of him, head bowed. Without hesitation Wilson touched him on the forehead. The man got back to his feet, his face radiant.

  “This isn’t even sporting," Wilson said. “I ought to shoot him on the rise."

  His Man Friday cocked his head, looked puzzled and answered in a deep, melodious voice. The words were liquid and strange and sounded like a phrase from a song. “You ought to commercialize that voice," Wilson said admiringly. “Some stars get by on less. However — Get along now, and fetch something to eat. Food." He pointed to his mouth.

  The man looked hesitant, spoke again. Bob Wilson reached into his pocket and took out the stolen notebook. He looked up “eat", then looked up “food". It was the same word. “Blellan," he said carefully.

  “Blellaaaan?"

  “Blellaaaaaaaan," agreed Wilson. “You’ll have to excuse my accent. Hurry up." He tried to find “hurry" in the vocabulary, but it was not there. Either the language did not contain the idea or Diktor had not thought it worthwhile to record it. But we’ll soon fix that, Wilson thought — if there isn’t such a word, I’ll give 'em one.

  The man departed.

  Wilson sat himself down Turk-fashion and passed the time by studying the notebook. The speed of his rise in these parts, he decided, was limited only by the time it took him to get into full communication. But he had only time enough to look up a few common substantives when his first acquaintance returned, in company.

  The procession was headed by an extremely elderly man, white-haired but beardless. All of the men were beardless. He walked under a canopy carried by four male striplings. Only he of all the crowd wore enough clothes to get by anywhere but on a beach. He was looking uncomfortable in a sort of toga effect which appeared to have started life as a Roman-striped awning. That he was the head man was evident.

  Wilson hurriedly looked up the word for “chief".

  The word for chief was “Diktor".

  It should not have surprised him, but it did. It was, of course, a logical probability that the word “Diktor" was a title rather than a proper name. It simply had not occurred to him.

  Diktor — the Diktor — had added a note under the word. “One of the few words," Wilson read, “which shows some probability of having been derived from the dead languages. This word, a few dozen others and the grammatical structure of the language itself, appear to be the only link between the language of the 'Forsaken Ones’ and the English language." The chief stopped in front of Wilson, just short of the pavement.

  “Okay, Diktor," Wilson ordered, “kneel down. You’re not exempt." He pointed to the ground. The chief knelt down. Wilson touched his forehead.

  The food that had been fetched along was plentiful and very palatable. Wilson ate slowly and with dignity, keeping in mind the importance of face. While he ate he was serenaded by the entire assemblage. The singing was excellent he was bound to admit. Their ideas of harmony he found a little strange and the performance, as a whole, seemed primitive, but their voices were all clear and mellow and they sang as if they enjoyed it.

  The concert gave Wilson an idea. After he had satisfied his hunger he made the chief understand, with the aid of the indispensable little notebook, that he and his flock were to wait where they were. He then returned to the Hall of the Gate and brought back from there the phonograph and a dozen assorted records. He treated them to a recorded concert of “modern" music.

  The reaction exceeded his hopes. “Begin the Beguine" caused tears to stream down the face of the old chief. The first movement of Tschaikowsky’s “Concerto Number One in B Flat Minor" practically stampeded them. They jerked. They held their heads and moaned. They shouted their applause. Wilson refrained from giving them the second movement, taper
ed them off instead with the compelling monotony of the “Bolero."

  “Diktor," he said — he was not thinking of the old chief — “Diktor, old chum, you certainly had these people doped out when you sent me shopping. By the time you show up — if you ever do — I’ll own the place."

  Wilson’s rise to power was more in the nature of a triumphal progress than a struggle for supremacy; it contained little that was dramatic. Whatever it was that the High Ones had done to the human race it had left them with only physical resemblance and with temperament largely changed. The docile friendly children with whom Wilson dealt had little in common with the brawling, vulgar, lusty, dynamic swarms who had once called themselves the people of the United States.

  The relationship was like that of Jersey cattle to longhorns, or cocker spaniels to wolves. The fight was gone out of them. It was not that they lacked intelligence, or civilized arts; it was the competitive spirit that was gone, the will-to-power.

  Wilson had a monopoly on that.

  But even he lost interest in playing a game that he always won. Having established himself as boss man by taking up residence in the palace and representing himself as the viceroy of the departed High Ones, he, for a time, busied himself in organizing certain projects intended to bring the, culture “up-to-date" — the reinvention of musical instruments, establishment of a systematic system of mail service, redevelopment of the idea of styles in dress and a tabu against wearing the same fashion more than one season. There was cunning in the latter project. He figured that arousing a hearty interest in display in the minds of the womenfolk would force the men to hustle to satisfy their wishes. What the culture lacked was drive — it was slipping downhill. He tried to give them the drive they lacked.

  His subjects cooperated with his wishes, but in a bemused fashion, like a dog performing a trick, not because he understands it, but because his master and god desires it.

  He soon tired of it.

  But the mystery of the High Ones, and especially the mystery of their Time Gate, still remained to occupy his mind. His was a mixed nature, half-hustler, half-philosopher. The philosopher had his inning.

  It was intellectually necessary to him that he be able to construct in his mind a physio-mathematical model for the phenomena exhibited by the Time Gate. He achieved one, not a good one perhaps, but one which satisfied all of the requirements. Think of a plane surface, a sheet of paper or, better yet, a silk handkerchief — silk, because it has no rigidity, folds easily, while maintaining all of the relative attributes of a two-dimensional continuum on the surface of the silk itself. Let the threads of the woof be the dimension — or direction — of time; let the threads of the woof represent all three of the space dimensions.

  An ink spot on the handkerchief becomes the Time Gate. By folding the handkerchief that spot may be superposed on any other spot on the silk. Press the two spots together between thumb and forefinger; the controls are set, the Time Gate is open, a microscopic inhabitant of this piece of silk may crawl from one fold to the other without traversing any other part of the cloth.

  The model is imperfect; the picture is static — but a physical picture is necessarily limited by the sensory experience of the person visualizing it.

  He could not make up his mind whether or not the concept of folding the four-dimensional continuum — three of space, one of time — back on itself so that the Gate was “open" required the concept of higher dimensions through which to fold it. It seemed so, yet it might simply be an intellectual shortcoming of the human mind. Nothing but empty space was required for the “folding," but “empty space" was itself a term totally lacking in meaning — he was enough of a mathematician to know that.

  If higher dimensions were required to “hold" a four-dimensional continuum, then the number of dimensions of space and of time were necessarily infinite; each order requires the next higher order to maintain it.

  But “infinite" was another meaningless term. “Open series" was a little better, but not much.

  Another consideration forced him to conclude that there was probably at least one more dimension than the four his senses could perceive — the Time Gate itself. He became quite skilled in handling its controls, but he never acquired the foggiest notion of how it worked, or how it had been built. It seemed to him that the creatures who built it must necessarily have been able to stand outside the limits that confined him in order to anchor the Gate to the structure of space time. The concept escaped him.

  He suspected that the controls he saw were simply the ones that stuck through into the space he knew. The very palace itself might be no more than a three-dimensional section of a more involved structure. Such a condition would help to explain the otherwise inexplicable nature of its architecture.

  He became possessed of an overpowering desire to know more about these strange creatures, the “High Ones," who had come and ruled the human race and built this palace and this Gate, and gone away again — and in whose backwash he had been flung out of his setting some thirty millennia. To the human race they were no more than a sacred myth, a contradictory mass of tradition. No picture of them remained, no trace of their writing, nothing of their works save the High Palace of Norkaal and the Gate. And a sense of irreparable loss in the hearts of the race they had ruled, a loss expressed by their own term for themselves — the Forsaken Ones.

  With controls and speculum he hunted back through time, seeking the Builders. It was slow work, as he had found before. A passing shadow, a tedious retracing — and failure.

  Once he was sure that he had seen such a shadow in the speculum. He set the controls back far enough to be sure that he had repassed it, armed himself with food and drink and waited.

  He waited three weeks.

  The shadow might have passed during the hours he was forced to take out for sleep. But he felt sure that he was in the right period; he kept up the vigil.

  He saw it.

  It was moving toward the Gate.

  When he pulled himself together he was halfway down the passageway leading away from the hall. He realized that he had been screaming. He still had an attack of the shakes.

  Somewhat later he forced himself to return to the hall, and, with eyes averted, enter the control booth and return the spheres to zero. He backed out hastily and left the hall for his apartment. He did not touch the controls or enter the hail for more than two years.

  It had not been fear of physical menace that had shaken his reason, nor the appearance of the creature — he could recall nothing of how it looked. It had been a feeling of sadness infinitely compounded which had flooded through him at the instant, a sense of tragedy, of grief insupportable and unescapable, of infinite weariness. He had been flicked with emotions many times too strong for his spiritual fiber and which he was no more fitted to experience than an oyster is to play a violin.

  He felt that he had learned all about the High Ones a man could learn and still endure. He was no longer curious. The shadow of that vicarious emotion ruined his sleep, brought him sweating out of dreams.

  One other problem bothered him — the problem of himself and his meanders through time. It still worried him that he had met himself coming back, so to speak, had talked with himself, fought with himself.

  Which one was himself?

  He was all of them, he knew, for he remembered being each one. How about the times when there had been more than one present?

  By sheer necessity he was forced to expand the principle of nonidentity — “Nothing is identical with anything else, not even with itself" — to include the ego. In a four-dimensional continuum each event is an absolute individual, it has its space coordinates and its date. The Bob Wilson he was right now was not the Bob Wilson he had been ten minutes ago. Each was a discrete section of a four-dimensional process. One resembled the other in many particulars, as one slice of bread resembles the slice next to it. But they were not the same Bob Wilson — they differed by a length of time.

  When he had do
ubled back on himself, the difference had become apparent, for the separation was now in space rather than in time, and he happened to be so equipped as to be able to see a space length, whereas he could only remember a time difference. Thinking back he could remember a great many different Bob Wilsons, baby, small child, adolescent, young man. They were all different — he knew that. The only thing that bound them together into a feeling of identity was continuity of memory.

  And that was the same thing that bound together the three — no, four, Bob Wilsons on a certain crowded afternoon, a memory track that ran through all of them. The only thing about it that remained remarkable was time travel itself.

  And a few other little items — the nature of “free will," the problem of entropy, the law of the conservation of energy and mass. The last two, he now realized, needed to be extended or generalized to include the cases in which the Gate, or something like it, permitted a leak of mass, energy or entropy from one neighborhood in the continuum to another. They were otherwise unchanged and valid. Free will was another matter. It could not be laughed off, because it could be directly experienced — yet his own free will had worked to create the same scene over and over again. Apparently human will must be considered as one of the, factors which make up the processes in the continuum — “free" to the ego, mechanistic from the outside.

  And yet his last act of evading Diktor had apparently changed the course of events. He was here and running the country, had been for many years, but Diktor had not showed up. Could it be that each act of “true" free will created a new and different future? Many philosophers had thought so.

  This future appeared to have no such person as Diktor — the Diktor — in it, anywhere or anywhen.

  As the end of his first ten years in the future approached, he became more and more nervous, less and less certain of his opinion. Damnation, he thought, if Diktor is going to show up it was high time that he did so. He was anxious to come to grips with him, establish which was to be boss.