The Best of C. L. Moore

by C. L. Moore

  left them had mattered a snap of the fingers to Eric Rosner. He searched on restlessly.

  In this mood of feverish hunting for new things, he met the scientist, Walter Dow. It happened casually, and they might never have met a second time had not Eric said something offhand about the lack of adventure which life had to offer a man. And Dow laughed.

  “What do you know about adventure?” he demanded. He was a little man with a shock of prematurely white hair and a face that crinkled into lines of derision as he laughed. “You’ve spent your life among dangers and gunfire—sure! But that’s not real adventure. Science is the only field where true adventure exists. I mean it! The things that are waiting to be discovered offer fields of excitement like nothing you ever heard of. One man in a lifetime couldn’t begin to touch the edges of what there is to know. I tell you I——”

  “Oh, sure,” interrupted Eric lazily. “I see what you mean. But all that’s not for me. I’m a man of action; I haven’t any brains. Hunching over a microscope isn’t my idea of fun.”

  The argument that began then developed into a queer sort of antagonistic friendship which brought the two men together very often in the weeks that passed. But they were to know one another much more intimately than that before the true urgency of what lay in the minds of each became clear to the other.

  Walter Dow had spent a lifetime in the worship of one god—inertia. “There is a bedrock,” he used to say reverently, “over which the tides of time ebb and flow, over which all things material and immaterial, as the layman sees them, change and fade and form again. But the bedrock remains. Complete inertia! What couldn’t we do if we attained it!”

  “And what,” asked Eric, “is inertia?”

  Dow shot him a despairing glance.

  “Everybody knows what inertia is. Newton’s first law of motion is the law of inertia, stating that every body remains in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless impressed forces change it. That’s what makes people in a moving car swerve to one side when the car goes round a bend. It’s what makes it so difficult for a horse to start a heavy load moving, though once it’s in motion the strain eases. There’s nothing that doesn’t obey the law—nothing!

  “But Newton didn’t dream what measureless abysses of force lay behind his simple statement. Or what an understatement it was. Describing inertia by stating Newton’s law is like describing the sea

  by saying there’s foam on the waves. The inertia force is inherent in everything, just as there’s moisture in everything. But behind that inertia, manifest so obscurely in matter, is a vastness of power much greater comparatively than the vastnesses of the seas which are the storehouses for the relatively tiny amounts of moisture in everything you see.

  “I can’t make you understand; you don’t speak the language. And I sometimes wonder if I could explain even to another physicist all that I’ve discovered in the past ten years. But I do very firmly believe that it would be possible to anchor to that bedrock of essential, underlying inertia which is the base upon which matter builds and—and allow time itself to whirl by!”

  “Yeah, and find yourself floating in space when you let go.” Eric grinned. “Even I’ve heard that the universe is in motion through space. I don’t know about time, but I’m pretty sure space would block your little scheme.”

  “I didn’t mean you’d have to—to dig your anchor right into the rock,” explained Dow with dignity. “It’d be a sort of a drag to slow you down, not a jerk that would snatch you right off the Earth. And it’d involve—immensities—even then. But it could be done. It will be done. By Heaven, I’ll do it!”

  Eric’s sunburned face sobered.

  “You’re not kidding?” he asked. “A man could—could drag his anchor and let time go by, and ‘up-anchor’ in another age? Say! Make me an anchor, and I’ll be your guinea pig!”

  Dow did not smile.

  “That’s the worst of it,” he said. “All this is pure theory and will have to remain that, in spite of all I’ve bragged. It would be absolutely blind experimenting, and the very nature of the element I’m experimenting with precludes any proof of success or failure. I could—to be frank with you I have—sent objects out through time——”

  “You have!” Eric leaned forward with a jerk and laid an urgent hand on Dow’s arm. “You really have?”

  “Well, I’ve made them vanish. I think it proves I’ve succeeded, but I have no way of knowing. The chances are countless millions to one against my landing an experiment in my own immediate future, with all the measureless vastness of time lying open. And, of course, I can’t guide it.”

  “Suppose you landed in your own past?” queried Eric.

  Dow smiled.

  “The eternal question,” he said. “The inevitable objection to the very idea of time travel. Well, you never did, did you? You know it

  never happened! I think there must be some inflexible law which forbids the same arrangement of matter, the pattern which is one’s self, from occupying the same space time more than once. As if any given section of space time were a design in which any arrangement of atoms is possible, except that no pattern may appear exactly twice.

  “You see, we know of time only enough to be sure that it’s far beyond any human understanding. Though I think the past and the future may be visited, which on the face of it seems to predicate an absolutely preordained future, a fixed and unchangeable past—yet I do not believe that time is arbitrary. There must be many possible futures. The one we enter upon is not the only way. Have you ever heard that theory explained? It’s not a new one—the idea that at every point of our progress we confront crossroads, with a free choice as to which we take. And a different future lies down each.

  “I can transport you into the past, and you can create events there which never took place in the past we know—but the events are not new. They were ordained from the beginning, if you took that particular path. You are simply embarking upon a different path into a different future, a fixed and preordained future, yet one which will be strange to you because it lies outside your own layer of experience. So you have infinite freedom in all your actions, yet everything you can possibly do is already fixed in time.”

  “Why, then—then there’s no limit to the excitement a man could find in navigating time,” said Eric almost reverently. And then in sudden urgency, “Dow, you’ve got to fix it up for me! This is what I’ve been hunting!”

  “Are you crazy, boy? This is nothing that can ever be proved safe except by the actual experiment, and the experiment could never return. You know that, don’t you? From what blind groping I’ve done, it seems to me that time is not a constant flow, but an ebb and flux that can’t be measured. It would be hard to explain to you. But you couldn’t return—couldn’t guide yourself. You wouldn’t dare try it!”

  “I’m fed up with certainty and safety! And as for returning, what have I here to return to? No, you can’t scare me. I’ve got to try it!”

  “Absolutely no,” said Dow firmly.

  But three months later he was standing under the great skylight of his laboratory, watching Eric buckle a flat metal pack on his heavy young shoulders. Though reluctance still lined the scientist’s face, under its shock of white hair he was alight almost as hotly as the younger man, with the tremendous adventure of what was about to

  happen. It had taken weeks of persuasion and argument, and he was not wholly at ease even yet about the experiment, but the fever that burned in Eric Rosner was not to be denied.

  Now that the way was open, it seemed to Eric that all his life he had lived toward this moment in the laboratory. The need for this launching upon time’s broad river was what had driven him restless and feverish through the petty adventures which life had shown him. Peace was upon him now for the first time in months. There was something rather awe-inspiring about it.

  “Look here,” broke in Walter Dow upon the raptness of his mood. “Are you sure you understand?”


  “I don’t understand anything about the works, and I don’t much care,” said Eric. “All I know is I’m to snap these switches here”-—he laid big sunburned hands on the two rods at his belt—”when I want to move along. That will throw out the anchor. Right?”

  “As far as it goes, yes. That will increase your inertia sufficiently to make you immune to time and space and matter. You will be inert mentally and physically. You’ll sink down, so to speak, to the bedrock, while time flows past you. I have in this pack on your back, connecting with the switches in the belt, the means to increase your inertia until no outside force can interrupt it. And a mechanism there will permit the switches to remain thrown until one small part, insulated from the inertia in a tiny time space of its own, trips, the switches again and up-anchors. And if my calculations are correct—and I think they are—there you’ll be in some other age than ours. You can escape from it by throwing the switches again and returning to inertia, to be released after an interval by the automatic insulated mechanism in your pack. Got it?”

  “Got it!” Eric grinned all over his good-looking, sunburned face. “Everything ready now?”

  “Yes—yes, except that—are you sure you want to risk it? This may be plain murder, boy! I don’t know what will happen!”

  “That’s the beauty of it—not knowing. Don’t worry, Walter. Call it suicide, not murder, if that helps you any. I’m going now. Good-by.”

  Dow choked a little as he gripped the younger man’s hand hard, but Eric’s face was shining with the fever to be gone, and at the last• the scientist was almost reconciled by the sight of that rapt face. Almost he saw in the last instant before the switches closed a purpose vaster than his own, sweeping the work of his hands and the exultant young man before him into a whole that fulfilled some greater need than he could guess.

  Then Eric’s hands dropped to his belt. One last instant he stood

  --7

  there, tall under the clear radiance of the skylight, blond and sunburned, the tale of his riotous, brawling life clear upon his scarred, young face, but upon it, too, a raptness and an eagerness that sent a quick stab of unreasoning hope through the scientist’s mind. Surely success would crown this experiment. Surely all the vital, throbbing aliveness, the strength and seasoned toughness of this brawny young man before him could not snuff into nothing as the switches closed. Danger awaited him—yes, danger against which the gun at his belt might not avail at all. But splendor, too. Splendor— Envy clouded Dow’s eyes for a moment, as the switches closed.

  Past Eric’s eyes eternity ebbed blindingly. Rushing blankness closed over him, but he was conscious of infinite motion, infinite change passing over him, by him, through him, as events beyond imagination streamed past that anchorage in inertia’s eternal bedrock. For a timeless eternity it lasted. And then—and then.— A confusion of noises from very far away began to sound in his ears.

  That rushing blurriness abated and slowed and by degrees took on a nebulous shape. He was looking down from a height of about thirty feet upon a street scene which he identified roughly as Elizabethan by the costumes of those who moved through the crowd below him.

  Something was wrong. The machine could not have worked perfectly somehow, for he did not feel that he was actually present. The scene was uncertain and wavery, like a faulty film reflecting upon an uneven screen. There must have been an obstruction somewhere in that particular time section, though what it was he never knew.

  He leaned forward for a few minutes, looking down eagerly through the hazy uncertainty that shrouded the place. He did not seem to himself to be resting on anything; yet he was conscious of that forward bending as he looked down. It was inexplicable.

  The noises rose up to him now loudly, now softly, from the shifting, pushing throng. Shopkeepers bawled their wares from both sides of the street. Apprentice boys darted to and fro through the crowd, waylaying passers-by.

  A girl in a scarlet cloak flung open a window and leaned out to wave a message to someone below, her bright hair falling about her face. In the room behind her, dimly seen, another girl moved forward and flung both arms about her waist, laughing, dragging her back. Their merriment rose clearly to Eric’s ears.

  But all this was not real. That cloudiness hazed it over time and again, until his eyes ached from trying to follow what was happening.

  Regretfully, he reached for the switches at his belt, and in a breath the whole place shimmered and vanished. Oblivion in a torrent poured over him as the centuries plunged by over the bedrock inertia to which he was anchored.

  The automatic workings of the time machine on his shoulders clicked on. Then the switches threw themselves and the blankness cleared from Eric’s mind again. He found himself staring through a screen of leaves upon a grassy meadow through which trickled a small brook. He was tangibly, actually here this time, standing on soft turf and feeling the stir of a breeze through the leaves.

  Over the slope of the meadow before him dingy white sheep moved slowly. A little curly-haired boy in a brief leather garment leaned on the grass drowsily, watching them. Sun lay yellow over the whole scene. It was peaceful and dreamy as an idyl, but for some obscure reason Eric’s hands moved to his belt almost of their own accord, a feeling of disappointment stirring vaguely in his mind. This was not what he sought. Sought? Was he seeking? Almost one might think so, he told himself.

  The thought troubled him as he clicked the switches at his belt. What was it that by its absence here made him dismiss the idyllic scene with a glance? He was hunting something, restlessly searching through the ages for—something. Then the tidal rush of the centuries over his anchorage blotted out wonder and all else in its oblivion.

  Sunlight like a physical blow crashed down about him—blazing hot sun that beat violently upon marble pavement and struck blindingly up again into his eyes. For a few seconds he was aware of nothing more than this intolerable glare. Gradually out of the blazing heat the lines of marble walls became clear about him. He stood upon the floor of a dazzling white marble pit about twenty feet square. Against the opposite wall lay a man whose naked, blood-spattered body was so still under the down-blazing heat that Eric could not be sure that he was alive.

  He had seen this much before the rising babble of excited voices above him mounted loud enough to pierce his dazed surprise. He• looked up. Leaning over the pit’s rim were faces—faces and arms and here and there a trail of velvet robe, a bright scarf’s fringe. They were the faces of aristocrats, fine and dissipated and cruel. But all expression was wiped from every one now.

  In that first glance he had of them he thought they must be Romans. He had little to judge by save their hair dressing, and only a

  momentary glimpse of that; for, as he raised his head, his eyes met the strange, smoke-bitie eyes of a woman who leaned upon the marble rim just in front of him, and above. A little space separated her from those on each side. He had the swift impression that she was of higher rank than the rest—some fleeting touch of arrogance and pride in the face looking down on him. And it was a familiar face. Why he could not guess, but in that glimpse of her he was sure that he had seen those features somewhere before, and recently.

  Then she lifted one bare arm upon whose whiteness the sun struck dazzlingly, and pointed downward. From behind her came the sound of metal upon stone, and in the blinding light he saw a man’s arm move swiftly. The sun struck upon a long shaft of steel. The spear was hurtling straight for his breast as his hands flew to his belt. The switches clicked, and in one great sweeping blur the whole scene vanished.

  After that came a blurry interval of unthinkable inertness. The centuries poured past. Then reality burst upon him again as the switches clicked off. He choked suddenly and gasped as air thicker and moister than the air of a tropical swamp smothered his lungs. He stood there for a moment struggling with it, forcing himself to evener breathing, as his bewildered gaze swept the scene before him.

  He stood in a square of ruined walls that must
once have been a small building, though roof and sides had vanished now and little was left but a crumbling square outlining the long-fallen house. To one side a higher heap of stone, which was all that was left of the western wall, obstructed his view of what lay beyond. Over the fallen blocks before him he could see a vast paved square dotted with other buildings fallen into ruin. And beyond these, under a heavily clouded sky through which the obscured sun poured in a queer, grayly radiant light, buildings of barbaric colors and utterly alien architecture lifted their Cyclopean heights, massive as the walls of Kamak, but too strangely constructed to awake any memories.

  Even at this distance he recognized those darker blotches upon the tremendous walls as the sign of a coming dissolution. It was a city more awfully impressive than any he had ever dreamed of, standing gigantic under the low, gray sky of this swamplike world—but its glory was past. Here and there gaps in the colossal walls spoke of fallen blocks and ruined buildings. By the thick, primordial air and the swamp smell and the unrecognizable architecture he knew that he gazed upon a scene of immortal antiquity, and his breath came quicker as he stared, wondering where the people were whose

  Cyclopean city this was, what name they bore and if history had ever recorded it.

  A medley of curious sounds coming nearer awoke him from the awed trance into which he had sunk. Feet shuffling over pavement, the clang of metal shivering against metal, hoarse breathing, and a strange, intermittent hissing he could not account for. It came from that part of the great square which the crumbling wall beside him hid.

  That queer hissing sounded loud. Some one yelled in a growling guttural, and he heard the beat of running feet, staggering and uncertain, coming nearer. Then a figure that was a dazzle of white and scarlet flashed through the aperture in the crumbling wall where a door must once have been. It was a girl. Her choked breath beat loud in the narrow place, and the scarlet that stained and streaked her was bright blood that gushed in ominous spurts from a deep gash in her side. She was incredibly white in the sunless day of this primordial city. Afterward he could never remember much more than that—her dazzling whiteness and the blood pumping in measured spurts from severed arteries—and the smoke blueness of her eyes.