The Time Trawlers

by Bert Filer

  THE TIME TRAWLERS

  Burt Filer

  Galaxy, August 1968

  Kearney sat up in Orestes' bow, one eye on his net, the other on the stars. He was a big kid with quiet eyes, hard arms and the knack. The fishing boat rocked beneath him as fishing boats have done for millennia, but with differences. For the tang of fish in salt air was substituted for the thin reek of warm insulation; for the lap of waves and gull cries there was the white star-hiss of quiet headphones and the sixty-cycle hum of machinery.

  The ship herself was as homely as her task, a symmetrical cucumber all lumpy with warts. Each of these carried a net and its netman, except one large blister on the port side that was the bridge. Orestes dragged her skein through space behind her, flapping empty since they'd so far caught nothing.

  The net that Kearney plied so skillfully was a strange thing; a ribbon of light that wasn't light at all, but the shimmering boundary between present and future. For Orestes was a time trawler. She fished thirty gigayears into the future for raw materials to feed the hungry galaxy of the present. Kearney hadn't had netwatch by himself until this trip; he'd just recently been qualified. But only the rulebook had held him back this long because, as everyone knew, he had the knack. Something behind those dark eyes could read the stars. Computers were all right for the ordinary netman, but nothing beat the knack if you had it, and Kearney had it in spades.

  How did he know where a star was going to be in thirty billion years? Or more exactly thirty one point 976,034,762, which was their present trawling depth? Well, he looked at them, talked to them a little. In a way he wooed them, loved them, asked them where they were going and couldn't he come along? After sitting there an hour or two, watching their slow, syncopated dance, he got an idea of things. Gavotte, twist, sometimes a just free ballet, all for grace. Kearney followed the dance.

  Old ones went nova, and he knew there'd be a space there pretty soon, deep in time or shallower, depending on their size. So they wouldn't pull their little trains of followers or get in the way of others, after a while.

  Kearney could even pick out those which danced awkwardly, encumbered by a system of planets, an even more valuable part of his knack. The trawlers called these the big ones, because the smallest planet was worth more commercially than the largest sun.

  It's hard to tell if Kearney thought of the stars as stars. It's more likely he regarded them as birds or ghosts. Bodecs, down in centcomm, said he sometimes heard the kid humming to himself, talking to them, even answering, "Hey little jobber, where the hell have you been?" and stuff like that. He said, "Yes," a lot too, which was weirder still.

  But whatever Bodecs or the rest of them thought, they kept it to themselves, even the skipper. Kearney had the knack, and that was enough. They'd go home with a fat catch because of it. It was only a matter of time before the kid tracked down a biggy and earned them all a bonus.

  So Kearney sat up in the bow bubble and talked to the stars. He spun his nets down in the future and sang to himself. He knew where they'd be, the biggies, and he systematically avoided them . Nobody knew that, of course.

  His problem, if you want to call it that, was scruples. Big ones were valuable because of their planets. While the raw energy of stars had to be processed down to matter, planets were matter to begin with. The processing was ten times easier and cheaper, so the trawlers got ten times the normal price for them at Port Pluto. But planets often had the unsettling property of supporting life, and processing them down to raw materials was a little rough on the natives. Which turned Kearney completely off.

  It would only have been a matter of time before his otherwise bountiful net would become conspicuous for its lack of big ones; but that time never came because something else happened first.

  Kearney was probing when he felt the vibes.

  He locked on. Something down there. To centcomm he said, "Bodecs? Hey Bodecs, I've got something. Little but heavy."

  "Need help?"

  "No, my net'll take it. But wake up the winch crew."

  Seen from a few miles off, the Orestes netlifting operations were slow and unspectacular. A few lights went on, making odd blotches beneath her translucent skin. All the other nets flickered off so as not to foul Kearney's, and to leave more power for the winch. Kearney's beam grew more intense, and the veins of blue began to writhe in its milky light. The fishing ship herself swung around to tug the net in along the line of her keel. For almost an hour, nothing else happened. They towed their catch up through the thirty-billion-year quarantined layer.

  The reason for the layer was obvious. You didn't want to deplete the near future to feed the present. You might end up hurting yourself, in a sense killing your grandson so that your son could be born.

  The layer was more than an inconvenience, since the deepest a good net would go was only thirty-two gigayears. So fishermen were restricted to skimming a very thin layer of the future, which made for maximum work and competition, minimum profit.

  Up it came, Kearney's catch. It bobbed into the visible portion of his net beam and stayed there, shimmering. It was a starship.

  Kearney let out his breath until there was no more air and then wrung his lungs out even further. He'd done it; he'd put the Orestes on the track of a biggy. The mother system of that little round ship was lying down on the bottom somewhere nearby. He sat there and quietly hated himself. In his earphones, there was jubilation. The skipper told Kearney to swing his catch back along their ship to where the grappling beams could stuff it into the skein, and he did what he was told. Even as he worked, half a dozen netbeams swept down-time near where his prize had emerged.

  They got it. Six fat nets locked on, intensified, veined and pulled. In the earphones came a babble of orders and cheers and a mild congratulation from the skipper himself. Well done! Then more orders. It would take time. It was a Sol-sized star with four planets. One was a neo-Venus, obviously the home of the starship. Some one calculated that she'd bring a three-thou bonus to every man aboard. Hey-y-y's came in a chorus, with more verbal pats on the back for Kearney.

  Kearney switched off his net, slumped in the bubble and ran thoughtful fingers through his adolescent beard. Then, moving slowly so as not to draw a conspicuous amount of power, he swivelled his netgun's focus to the throat of the busy nets outside. He fingered power mode to repulsion, and waited. It would wreck six beam generators, maybe the ship, cost a million solars and his own life -- but baby, that was going to be the big one that got away.

  As the edge of their neo-Sol broke surface, Kearney triggered his netbeam and gave the power knob a vicious twist. His beam flared for a fraction of a second and went out. He'd overdone it, and the circuit breaker had blown. Even so, the six-beam net that meshed around the big one grew duller, then brighter in a series of power oscillations that rocked the Orestes. Bedlam sounded in the phones.

  "What was that? . . . Damned if I know. . Do you suppose the natives . . . Naww . . . power failure? . . . Engine room, how's the secondary? . . . Four-oh, Skipper, I swear it. There was this big surge and . . ."

  So nobody knew. Kearney was prepared to blow his skin for success, but not failure. He swung his netbeam back to where it belonged, moded for normal power, reset the breaker, and left the bubble.

  The passageways were dark, all power going to the nets. He fumbled along, aided only by his pocket torch, found the crew's wardroom, and drew some blacko. The first cup shook in his hand. The second didn't, and he could think again. He'd been foolish to think they wouldn't find out. A rerun of the engineering logs -- after they were done with the hectic routine of reeling in the nets -- would surely give him away.

  It didn't even take that long. The wardroom was a large space and, except for Kearney, empty. It echoed wh
en the PA went on and the skipper's voice boomed, "Netman Joseph Kearney, to my cabin, on the double."

  The skipper's cabin was a square room with hologram murals of Tennessee hills on two walls. It was brightly lit even now, well furnished, greenly carpeted, and the oxygen was at full earth pressure, not the gaspy eighteen-six of the crew's quarters. Except for the furious little man behind the desk, it was a very nice place indeed. Skipper Macklin had a strip of logtape in his hand, and he shook it in Kearney's face.

  "Just what in hell is this all about?"

  "I tried to cut the nets."

  Macklin's jaw dropped, then shut to form a wince that came with lemon sucking. "Why?"

  "The natives."

  "I don't believe it!" There was a long pause, ending with a sigh. "Yes, I do. Damn shame, too. You were good." Macklin stared disgustedly up at him, then got to his feet.

  "Okay, out. If I see that baby face of yours for the rest of the cruise, I'll put a foot in it. Stay off the nets, you're through."

  "Yes, sir."

  "And Kearney."

  "Yes?"

  "You're lucky you're such a kid. Otherwise, I'd kill you."

  Kearney reeled back to crew's quarters in a daze. For perhaps twenty minutes he felt lucky to be alive. But for the rest of the cruise he felt rotten, and they were out the full four months.

  He spent a lot of time staring out the stern bubble at the skein. Though they caught several planetoids and one neo-Uranus-sized free planet, Kearney's biggy dwarfed them all, tugging the skeinbeams tight around her. There was even a little fear on board that she'd burst the skein, which was tantamount to having a fusion bomb go off on the back porch. But it held.

  The big one had been netted up intact, with even her rotation and energy balance preserved. It was likely the natives were still alive, possibly even unaware that they traveled in a temporal pocket thirty billion years in the past.

  Kearney gazed on. Men had overrun the galaxy or there would not have been any time trawlers in the first place. Quadrillions of human beings scattered among the near stars, running out of food, metal, everything. The future opened before them like a tantalizing cornucopia. If the nets reached deeper, they could catch enough other material to toss back the big ones. But as it stood, the planets were altogether necessary, even inhabited ones.

  That was the problem, and there wasn't any answer. When the Orestes finally anchored half a dozen parsecs off Port Pluto, Kearney went below and stayed. He didn't want to see the processing. He didn't want to see the awful explosion when Orestes dropped her shield and the neo-Venus found herself thirty gigayears displaced in time, her sun slowly going out, her orbit wavering, her floods, her freezing, her loss of air. But most of all, Kearney didn't want to see the planet rent and ground to elements by the mining beams, or the endless line of space trucks that bore off the fragments like titanic hearses.

  It was about this time that Kearney had a thought. It was a good thought, and he decided to devote the rest of his life to it.

  He'd aged twenty years. The beard was fuller, the hair on his head thinner. Kearney still carried himself well, and though the springy grace of youth had gone, it had been replaced by the ponderous strength of a shot-putter. What few friends he had admired him.

  But at thirty-eight Kearney had very few friends indeed. It was bad enough to trawl for a living, but he seemed to trawl for pleasure as well. He hadn't seen earth for six years, and only went into Port Pluto to sell his fish. Kearney was a loner.

  After old Macklin had fired him, things had been difficult. He'd been blackballed. Fortunately the reputation of his knack went along with his reputation as a maverick, and commercial fishermen were a practical lot. He found work. In the course of four years on the boats out of Pluto he'd only turned up one more biggy. Lots of asteroids and suns, but only one biggy.

  Then he'd bought his own boat, a leaky old smack with her name stenciled on the stern: Limper. Somewhere along the line a crank had switched the final t to an r, and none of her long string of owners had since seen fit to change it.

  It was then that Kearney began his project. Alone on the Limper, he changed his tactics from avoiding the big ones to seeking them out. With his knack it wasn't difficult, either; he could have been a rich man. Yet the wholesalers to whom Kearney sold his catch had yet to record his bringing in a big one.

  The biggy kicking in his nets right now was his fortieth. As he locked in the winch beams, Kearney hummed in self-congratulation: forty in sixteen years. Leaving the Limper to finish hauling in by herself, he crawled out of the bubble and into his cramped combined bridge and cabin.

  Out came the thick notebook, of which thirty-nine pages were littered with notes, dates, calculations. It was quite like an anthropologist's fieldbook: thirty families of monkeys in their wild habitats. Discovered at different times. Habits noted. Notes of later visits. Each family had been given a toy -- or was it a tool? -- on an early visit, and their use of it observed on subsequent dates. There were gigayears between observations, sometimes. Some pages had stars, some x's, at least fifteen were crossed out blackly, failures for one reason or another. Nine were blank because there had been no monkeys at all.

  Kearney flipped to a blank page and put (40) in the upper left corner. Then:

  Big one Forty. Spatial location 790 X 328 X 237 Temporal location: September 11, 3181 -- plus 31.089,468,973.

  Then he dropped the pen into the crotch of the binding to mark his place and went over to the locker. He got out his diving suit, then sat down where he could see the netbeam reeling its catch up through the millennia, and waited.

  It bobbed to the surface an hour later: small, high intensity sun ringed by no less than seventeen planets. He took readings and immediately wrote off the first six and the last four as uninhabitable. Of the middle seven, the fifth looked most inviting, and he decided to hit her first. Kearney went aft to where the diving sled rested in her davits, sealed his helmet and shut the pressure lock behind him. A few minutes later the port opened and he aimed the little skiff out into space.

  There was a saying that old sailors got used to the sensation of time-diving, and Kearney was an old sailor. Going from the near-perfect vacuum of space, through the side of the netbeam and into the absolute vacuum of non-time was hardly noticeable at first. But after thirty or forty seconds inside, your nose and kneecaps began to wander all over your body. A torrent of false sensations played over you like colors running through an acid head. Two minutes of it would have been unbearable, but it was usually all over in one. Kearney had long since found out that old sailors were liars.

  He filtered back into real -- although future -- time and found himself orbiting Forty's sun in roughly the same orbit as her fifth planet. He wheeled the sled into the smaller body's gravity well and let her pull it down, saving power, another trick only a man with a knack would dare. As he broke through the clouds and got his first good look, it was obvious that he'd guessed correctly.

  Forty-dash-Five was a water-world, the driest areas just sandy marshes full of brilliantly blue weeds. With a symmetry that only intelligence could produce, canals mazed through them. Tetrahedral domes of jelly lined the canals.

  Kearney picked the largest dome in view and landed next to it. Inside, four heads each with an eye and nine arms, stared hostilely out at him. Each arm held a spear. Kearney fought the urge to vomit, deciding then and there that he'd make no attempt to communicate.

  He put the wheel and crossbow, plus a dozen other mind-benders into the hatch and ejected them. Next, a barrel-sized sphere of stainless steel went out. In it was a world of information -- including his own biography and a promise to return.

  When he took off again, some two dozen spears glanced off his hull. If he came back in a hundred years they'd be bullets, he hoped. But judging by their present state of evolution, he made a mental note to hold off for at least a few hundred thousand.

  Kearney found life on none of the other six planets. About average, he s
ighed. Quite tired now, he headed back toward the apex of the net beam, and Limper. The last thing he did before turning in was to set up a rep shield around Forty.

  A few months later, Kearney headed into Port Pluto to drop his catch and pick up some fuel and supplies. The Limper towed laboriously at her skeinful of fish. Actually, she didn't tow them: her skeinbeams displaced their spatial coordinates of the future with those of the present. But this took energy -- of which Limper had little -- and she moved slowly.

  Kearney anchored out at the processing station and cut the skein field. The displaced hydrogen of real space parted with a bang to accept two suns and an asteroid out of the future, and for a few seconds the fireworks were quite impressive. The wholesaler Androsias cheated him as usual, and as usual Kearney didn't stop to haggle. He left Limper at the piers and took a shuttle into Pluto. He needed supplies, and a night off.

  The city was built on the inside surface of the hollowed-out planet. She was spun by external means -- ion beams up on her frozen outside surface -- and centrifugal force kept things attached to the inside shell with about half their normal weight. In essence it was an inside-out little place, quite unsettling until you got used to looking up and seeing down on the other side of the world, beyond the bluish artificial sun that was hung right in the middle by guywires.