The Time Masters

by Wilson Tucker

  “I’m not very bright. What about the Englishman?”

  “Still digging—he made several finds on the site, finds of immense scientific value and of course much gold. It’s a curious thing, but do you know, you humans worship gold above knowledge? Without exception, every archeologist I’ve heard or read of has discovered gold in his graves and excavations, and has attached as much or more importance to that than the artifacts he found there. Let one of them make a report of a new find, and at the very beginning of that report he will give a description of the gold leaves, gold headdresses, gold this or gold that he uncovered. I think that curious.”

  He paused to see if she even remotely agreed with him.

  “The deluge,” Hoffman reminded him.

  “To be sure—the deluge. Well, there he was, this Englishman, spading around and turning up first one thing and another, until finally he chanced upon a mass grave of royalty and servants. The ladies in waiting, the soldiers, the slaves, all murdered at the graveside and unceremoniously dumped in with their masters. That was highly unusual, at that particular place and time, so the Englishman dug deeper. Beneath the mass grave he discovered a layer of thick yellow clay some eight feet through, and below that, still other remains of humans and buildings. So there you are.”

  “So there I am not!” she contradicted him. “What is it all about?”

  Nash seemed mildly surprised. “The eight-foot layer of clay,” he said matter of factly, “deposited by an immense flood, accompanied by high winds and rivers running out of their banks. Forty days and forty nights of rain, one hundred and fifty days before the water® receded—all that left an eight-foot deposit in the valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Biblical flood, pretty well pinned down. Human remains above the clay as well as below it. Our Englishman finished the work of two other Englishmen before him and left the religious world in something of a turmoil. They didn’t quite appreciate the show.”

  “Now you’re running in more Englishmen on me.” she complained. “You aren’t fair!”

  “But haven’t you heard of the Gilgamesh Epic?”

  “Gilgamesh?” she repeated. “No.”

  Nash shook his head, sadly reproving her. “Modem woman, tch, tch.”

  “Oh, tch, tch, my eye! All right, I’m thoroughly trapped now. Tell me about the other two Englishmen and the Gilgamesh Epic. Will this be a short story?”

  “Sort of. I’ll condense it. These other two Englishmen came before the one we just finished off. The first one found and shipped home to England several tablets dug out of a buried palace. The second Englishman then spent several years and all but wrecked his health in translating those tablets, seeking to confirm certain theories proposed by the man before him. His translation rocked the staid Victorians and created the hubbub. The poor fellow was not fully vindicated until our third Englishman happened along some years later and discovered that bed of clay beneath the mass grave and the palaces.”

  Hoffman nodded brightly. “The point is slowly becoming clear. The translator found a Biblical story on the stone tablets.”

  Nash regarded her with speculation. “No. He found what was supposed to be a work of pure fiction.”

  “Supposed to be?”

  He nodded, smiling faintly. “A poem of epic proportions. The tablets had been taken from an ancient king’s library, you must understand, along with many others of a more common nature, Those others contained the usual factual data and were more or less expected: histories, genealogical studies, accounts of wars, of great personages, of prisoners and booty taken, some crude geographical surveys—everything a king might desire to make his library a storehouse of knowledge and of course a testimony to his own greatness. Now comes the square peg for the round hole. That library also contained this panoramic poem, in an age where fiction (if you’ll pardon the modern term) was almost unknown. This was a poem of a heroic, marvellous character—a godlike man called Gilgamesh.”

  “Oh . . .” Hoffman broke in, parted her lips to speak and then changed her mind. She watched him closely.

  “He was a man whose beginnings, whose origin were either un-known or unrecorded, and who stalked through the land accomplishing mighty deeds. Gilgamesh was something of a born adventurer who roamed the entire known world at that time, seeking knowledge, seeking immortality. He appeared here, visited there, upsetting tyrants and unsettling kingdoms. He finally met up with a prehistoric man with an unpronounceable name and—”

  “How unprounceable?” she interrupted.

  “Ut-napishtim.”

  Hoffman nodded her agreement. “Unprounceable.”

  “—and that fellow told Gilgamesh the story of his life,” Nash continued. He looked over at the girl musingly. “Come to think of it, that was probably the first use of the flashback technique in history. Imagine it—a fictioneer of forty centuries ago inventing the flashback.”

  Hoffman cupped her chin in her hand. “Gilgamesh . . .”

  “I’m getting there! So the prehistoric man told Gilgamesh an incredible tale that dwarfed any of his own adventures. He told of a terrible flood that descended upon the world, told of his building a boat and loading it with supplies, loading it with all the animals he could gather together, and the calling aboard of his kinfolk from far and near. He told how his little ship had courageously ridden through the storm and rising waters for many days and nights, and finally, how he sent out first a dove and then a raven to seek land. And that was how Ut-napishtim and his clan lived through the deluge while all around them perished.” Nash studied the girl over the rim of his glass. “Sound familiar?”

  “That was on the stone tablets?” she demanded.

  “It was—yes, hammered out as pure fiction.”

  “And the tablets were supposed to be how old?”

  “Three to four thousand years. Do you see now why the Victorians suddenly suffered rising blood pressure?”

  “Indeed I do! I should be inclined to doubt the evidence myself. But I suppose this is where our third Englishman comes in?”

  “Does, yes. He showed that the tablets were indeed fiction—they were the Assyrian version of hand-me-down Babylonian tales, which in turn were presumably based on fact. Simply a case of one kingdom borrowing a neighbour’s folk history and concocting a story. The Englishman made several discoveries indicating the authenticity of the tablets, including that layer of clay deposited by the flood. So you see—even historical novels, superman novels, were written four thousand years ago. Knocked out in stone. The sceptic may regard this one as merely a tale told by some nameless poet who sought to please a king; the believer, as the bold and earliest chronicle of Noah.” His fingers drummed on the tabletop. “If you put any faith in archeology at all, you will find that excavators have not only discovered and dated the deluge, but have gone on to discover traces of a still earlier people who must have lived in the times of Genesis. They are slowly catching up with anthropology and geology.”

  “I’m curious about the dates,” Hoffman said, just as curiously watching him.

  “The deluge? Well, our Englishman’s mass burial of king and slave happened about six thousand years ago. The layer of clay was before that, beneath it. Eight, ten thousand years ago? That remains to be seen. What you call modem man has been on earth now some twenty-five thousand years, and your primitive ancestor existed for perhaps another seventy-five thousand before that. That’s a rather broad span in which to attempt to pin down a definite place and time, but men are still digging. One group in particular are now searching for old Ut-napishtim’s boat. If and when they find it, they can pretty well date it. Or rather, they can date the trees which furnished timber for the boat.”

  “I’ve heard of that,” the girl put in. “Tree rings.”

  “No—not in a case like this. Someone has come up with a new process of measurement called the C-14 method, a process which measures the passage of time by the amount of radioactive residue in an organic substance. Your tree rings would b
e useless here because the tree died when it was cut down. It might measure life before it was felled, but not after.” He paused a moment in thought. “If the archeologists are lucky enough to find a chunk of wood from Ut-napishtim’s boat—well, they will tell you the approximate year that tree stood. The approximate year of Noah and his flood.” He grinned mischievously. “I wonder if that information will upset anyone?”

  They lapsed into silence as the waitress brought the meal and served it. Shirley Hoffman absently watched the woman lay out the dishes, fiddle with the silver, watched Nash spread a napkin in his lap. The room continued to be filled with noisy humanity. She looked up from the napkin to his face, to his eyes which startled her each time she saw them.

  “I want to ask one more question,” she ventured after a moment. “You very briefly mentioned the subject but you neglected to follow it through.”

  He stopped a bite of steak on its way to his mouth. “What was that?”

  “Did this adventurer, this Gilgamesh fellow, find his immortality?” Nash held the fork poised in mid-air for a moment arid then slowly slipped the meat into his mouth. After a second’s hesitation he glanced at the girl’s intent face.

  “He found what he was searching for. But it was much too late to save his life.”

  VIII.

  Cummings wandered in aimless circles about the inner office, looking for pictures on the wall that had never been there, absently seeking a splotch of sunlight on the floor that had not yet arrived with the early morning sun. He hesitated at the window, gloomily streaked his finger through the dust on the sill and then put his head out into the warm air to search the sky. The sun was still hidden behind the building. An interested pigeon perched on a near-by ledge, returning his curious stare. He blinked at the pigeon and pulled his head in, conscious that there might be others above him.

  “He talks to horses,” Cummings said dourly to the man seated at the desk behind him.

  Dikty nodded in assent. “Apparently.”

  “He must talk to the horses; they’re his friends. They tell him when and where to place his money—as if they knew which one was going to win! He scares me. The people over at Treasury tell me he’s something unique; he carefully notes down all his winnings but never his losses. Usually, it’s the other way around. If they remember to include their gambling at all. But Treasury claims his tax returns are models of something or other; fifty dollars for this case, seventy-five for that one, total earnings as an investigator something less than a thousand per year. You’d think he would starve.”

  “But he doesn’t, apparently,” Dikty murmured.

  “He doesn’t!” Cummings kicked at a chair in disgust. “Thanks to his friends, the horses. His tax returns are the damn’dest things I’ve ever seen in my life. His habit is to attach a typed letter to each one, naming the tracks, the horses, the dates, the odds, and the amounts of his winnings. Twenty-odd thousand dollars last year if you can believe it! Treasury does; they don’t even bother to check up on him any more—-they know he’s right. When the returns first started coming in some field office got curious and checked a few dates; they followed his luck pretty closely for two or three years. Now, they’re happy that he doesn’t deduct his losses, if any. If any, Dikty! The horses must talk to him.”

  “A shrewd cover,” Dikty commented. “A very shrewd cover for an income of less than a thousand per year. That house out in the country cost him something. Say—when was the first year he filed?”

  “March of 1941, for the previous year. In Georgia.” Cummings continued his distracted pacing of the room. “I’ve put a bug in their ear; they’ve started some discreet snooping, checking his bank account, checking the pay-off windows at those tracks he mentioned. With his fantastic luck, some of those parimutuel clerks must remember him. Well, we’ll see.” He glanced impatiently at his watch. “Want to catch the plane for Louisville at noon; it’s the usual rough going up at that new plant on the river.” The pacing had brought him to the doorway between the inner and outer offices. He stared around the vacant outer room and then back to Dikty. “The girl’s not in yet.”

  “Something holding her up I suspect.”

  “Sick?”

  “Landlady said no.” Dikty retrieved his pipe from an inner pocket. “Landlady said she left an hour or more ago, in a devil of a hurry. She’ll be along.”

  Cummings turned back to the window. “She had dinner with him last night, eh? Maybe he gave her a tip on a horse.”

  “I’m the fool who did the tipping,” Dikty retorted sourly, staring into the black bowl of the pipe. “Subject connected the two of us at the funeral when he saw me sniffing her perfume. I thought it was something new and stopped to sniff—it was. But she stumbled onto him in a restaurant last night and he promptly invited her to his table. She jumped at the opportunity. Reports that he made no attempt at all to pump her—it was the other way around.”

  “She’ll do,” Cummings nodded, searching the sky. He put his head out once more to find his feathered friend still there, still watching him. Contemplating the pigeon, Cummings asked, “Pick up anything on the microphones?”

  Dikty said no. “Not a blessed thing. He returned to his office after the Hodgkins funeral and spent the entire afternoon reading—apparently. No sounds but chair, desk, shoes, paper, the usual thing. He doesn’t even talk to himself out loud.” Dikty reached into a vest pocket and extracted a slip of paper. “He stopped by a bookstore this morning to order a book. The Thermodynamics of the Steady State. That’s not politics—I asked. Something to do with chemical engineering.”

  “Subject’s healthy interest in science continues.”

  Dikty packed his pipe in silence and then poised an unlit match in the air. “I’ve been wondering if it could have anything to do with Code four-four-seven? Chemical engineering, now. But then, I’m suspicious of everything and everybody.”

  “I don’t know; I sort of doubt it. But I’ll look into it.” Cummings shook his head. “You can never be sure until you’ve checked. We had to stop the presses on an encyclopedia last week—the fools were going to publish the figures on the critical mass of U-235.”

  Dikty was startled. “How’d they find out?”

  “A man worked it out! The consulting physicist who was writing the article for them figured it out in his fool head, and wanted to include it. We also made him eliminate some references to the refining properties of U-238; he wanted to tell the world how to make a more potent explosion. We seized the plates and several thousand copies already run off. How long can this go on?”

  Dikty didn’t answer because the outer door opened then and Shirley Hoffman staggered in, her arms laden with dusty volumes. Her eager young face seemed excited.

  “Good morning,” she said brightly, looking from one to the other. “I’ve been to the library. Treasure trove.” She pushed the corridor door shut with her heel and dropped the burden on her desk. “Heavy work.”

  Cummings gravely examined the stack of books and then glanced at Dikty. “Frittering away her time with reading. Don’t you keep her busy?”

  “Bosh,” Hoffman cut in before Dikty could think of an answer. “I’m hot on the trail.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of mummies, buried kings, the deluge, and Gilgamesh.” She paused a moment in frowning thought. “Gilgamesh can’t be found. Not in our library.”

  “I’ll get it for you in Washington,” Cummings said, and in the next breath added, “Why?”

  “Told you I was hot on the trail! Our subject knows all about Gilgamesh, so I want to know all about Gilgamesh.” She thought to correct the supervisor. “Gilgamesh is a him, not an it. A prehistoric man who wandered around the ancient Mediterranean; he’s in archeology. Can you really get it for me?”

  “I don’t believe there are more than nine million books in the Library of Congress.” He snapped his fingers. “You name it and you can have it. Just like that.”

  “Now you’re making fun of me.”


  Cummings turned again to examine the stack of volumes. “And now it’s archeology?”

  “Yes, very much so. It was all he talked about last night, and he wasn’t merely trying to impress me. He knew. I shouldn’t be surprised to find he knows things that aren’t in these books.”

  Dikty granted. “He knows which horse is the winner.”

  A door slammed with a distant, muffled sound and the three of them ceased talking. Dikty twisted around in his chair to reach out and touch the volume control on a tiny speaker mounted above the desk. The speaker hummed with increased life, but nothing more. The trio waited long minutes in continued silence.

  “Subject has reported for work,” Dikty muttered after a while. “Busy making his thousand or less for this year.” He listened as the microphones picked up new sounds, the muffled footsteps crossing a distant floor, a window being raised, a chair being pulled away from a desk. A heavy squeaking as the chair was occupied. And then nothing.

  “Serious thinker,” Cummings suggested dryly.

  “He is, really,” Hoffman agreed. “He has the detached viewpoint of the scholar, the witness who is sitting out of the mainstream of history, merely appraising it as it marches by. He continually referred to my ancestors, my humans, as if they were mine but not his.”

  “He had to be born somewhere,” Dikty repeated his old declaration. “And I don’t mean in Miami, Florida, on March 8th, 1940. After all—he’s thirty-one years old now.”

  “Apparently,” Cummings murmured. He was at the window again, watching the pigeon.

  Dikty threw him a suspicious glance.

  “I rather like him,” Hoffman quickly interposed. “He is a funny man. By that I mean, strange. Strange eyes, strange skin, strange manner of thinking. Sometimes I could glimpse the thought behind his speech—very strange thoughts. I found myself wondering if he thought in words, in pictures, in symbols or abstractions; perhaps he doesn’t think the way we do at all. But I rather like him.”