“I wouldn't have liked that at all,” Marcia said.
“Our trip was very lovely,” said Jane. “No violent things at all. Just the big red sun and the tide and that crab creeping along the beach. We were both deeply moved.”
“It's amazing what science can accomplish nowadays,” Fran said.
Mike and Ruby agreed they would try to arrange a trip to the end of the world as soon as the funeral was over. Cynthia drank too much and got sick. Phil, Tom, and Dave discussed the stock market. Harriet told Nick about her operation. Isabel flirted with Mike, tugging her neckline lower. At midnight someone turned on the news. They had some shots of the earthquake and a warning about boiling your water if you lived in the affected states. The president's widow was shown visiting the last president's widow to get some pointers for the funeral. Then there was an interview with an executive of the time-trip company. “Business is phenomenal,” he said. “Time-tripping will be the nation's number one growth industry next year.” The reporter asked him if his company would soon be offering something beside the end-of-the- world trip. “Later on, we hope to,” the executive said. “We plan to apply for congressional approval soon. But meanwhile the demand for our present offering is running very high. You can't imagine. Of course, you have to expect apocalyptic stuff to attain immense popularity in times like these.” The reporter said, “What do you mean, times like these?” but as the time-trip man started to reply, he was interrupted by the commercial. Mike shut off the set. Nick discovered that he was extremely depressed. He decided that it was because so many of his friends had made the journey, and he had thought he and Jane were the only ones who had. He found himself standing next to Marcia and tried to describe the way the crab had moved, but Marcia only shrugged. No one was talking about time-trips now. The party had moved beyond that point. Nick and Jane left quite early and went right to sleep, without making love. The next morning the Sunday paper wasn't de livered because of the Bridge Authority strike, and the radio said that the mutant amoebas were proving harder to eradicate than originally antici pated. They were spreading into Lake Superior and everyone in the region would have to boil all drinking water. Nick and Jane discussed where they would go for their next vacation. “What about going to see the end of the world all over again?” Jane suggested, and Nick laughed quite a good deal.
FLIGHT TO FOREVER
Poul Anderson
THAT MORNING IT rained, a fine, summery mist blowing over the hills and hiding the gleam of the river and the village beyond. Martin Saunders stood in the doorway letting the cool, wet air blow in his face and wondered what the weather would be like a hundred years from now.
Eve Lang came up behind him and laid a hand on his arm. He smiled down at her, thinking how lovely she was with the raindrops caught in her dark hair like small pearls. She didn't say anything; there was no need for it, and he felt grateful for silence.
He was the first to speak. “Not long now, Eve.” And then, realizing the banality of it, he smiled. “Only why do we have this airport feeling? It's not as if I'll be gone long.”
“A hundred years,” she said
“Take it easy, darling. The theory is foolproof. I've been on time jaunts before, remember? Twenty years ahead and twenty back. The projector works, it's been proven in practice. This is just a little longer trip, that's all.”
“But the automatic machines, that went a hundred years ahead, never came back—”
“Exactly. Some damn fool thing or other went wrong with them. Tubes blew their silly heads off, or some such thing. That's why Sam and I have to go, to see what went wrong. We can repair our machine. We can compensate for the well-known perversity of vacuum tubes.”
“But why the two of you? One would be enough. Sam—”
“Sam is no physicist. He might not be able to find the trouble. On the other hand, as a skilled mechanic he can do things I never could. We supplement each other.” Saunders took a deep breath. “Look, darling—”
Sam Hull's bass shout rang out to them. “All set, folks! Any time you want to go, we can ride!”
“Coming.” Saunders took his time, bidding Eve a proper fare well, a little in advance. She followed him into the house and down to the capacious underground workshop.
The projector stood in a clutter of apparatus under the white radiance of fluoro-tubes. It was unimpressive from the outside, a metal cylinder some ten feet high and thirty feet long with the unfinished look of all experimental set-ups. The outer shell was simply protection for the battery banks and the massive dimensional projector within. A tiny space in the forward end was left for the two men.
Sam Hull gave them a gay wave. His massive form almost blotted out the gray-smocked little body of MacPherson. “All set for a hundred years ahead!” he exclaimed. “Two thousand seventy-three, here we come!”
MacPherson blinked owlishly at them from behind thick lenses. “It all tests out,” he said. “Or so Sam here tells me. Personally, I wouldn't know an oscillograph from a klystron. You have an ample supply of spare parts and tools. There should be no difficulty.”
“I'm not looking for any, Doc,” said Saunders. “Eve here won't believe we aren't going to be eaten by monsters with stalked eyes and long fangs. I keep telling her all we're going to do is check your automatic machines, if we can find them, and make a few astronomical observations, and come back.”
“There'll be people in the future,” said Eve.
“Oh, well, if they invite us in for a drink we won't say no,” shrugged Hull. “Which reminds me—” He fished a pint out of his capacious coverall pocket. “We ought to drink a toast or something, huh?”
Saunders frowned a little. He didn't want to add to Eve's impression of a voyage into darkness. She was worried enough, poor kid, poor, lovely kid. “Hell,” he said, “we've been back to nineteen fifty-three and seen the house standing. We've been ahead to nineteen ninety-three and seen the house standing. Nobody home at either time. These jaunts are too dull to rate a toast.”
“Nothing,” said Hull, “is too dull to rate a drink.” He poured and they touched glasses, a strange little ceremony in the utterly prosaic laboratory. “Bon voyage!”
“Bon voyage.” Eve tried to smile, but the hand that lifted the glass to her lips trembled a little.
“Come on,” said Hull. “Let's go, Mart. Sooner we set out, the sooner we can get back.”
“Sure.” With a gesture of decision, Saunders put down his glass and swung toward the machine. “Goodbye, Eve, I'll see you in a couple of hours—after a hundred years or so.”
“So long—Martin.” She made the name a caress.
MacPherson beamed with avuncular approval.
Saunders squeezed himself into the forward compartment with Hull. He was a big man, long-limbed and wide-shouldered, with blunt, homely features under a shock of brown hair and wide-set gray eyes lined with crow's feet from much squinting into the sun. He wore only the plain blouse and slacks of his work, stained here and there with grease or acid.
The compartment was barely large enough for the two of them, and crowded with instruments—as well as the rifle and pistol they had along entirely to quiet Eve's fears. Saunders swore as the guns got in his way, and closed the door. The clang had in it an odd note of finality.
“Here goes,” said Hull unnecessarily.
Saunders nodded and started the projector warming up. Its powerful thrum filled the cabin and vibrated in his bones. Needles flickered across gauge faces, approaching stable values.
Through the single porthole he saw Eve waving. He waved back and then, with an angry motion, flung down the main switch.
The machine shimmered, blurred, and was gone. Eve drew a shuddering breath and turned back to MacPherson.
Grayness swirled briefly before them, and the drone of the projectors filled the machine with an enormous song. Saunders watched the gauges and inched back the switch that controlled their rate of time advancement. A hundred years ahead—less the number of
days since they'd sent the first automatic, just so that no dunderhead in the future would find it and walk off with it …
He slapped down the switch and the noise and vibration came to a ringing halt.
Sunlight streamed in through the porthole. “No house?” asked Hull. “A century is a long time,” said Saunders. “Come on, let's go out and have a look.”
They crawled through the door and stood erect. The machine lay in the bottom of a half-filled pit above which grasses waved. A few broken shards of stone projected from the earth. There was a bright blue sky overhead, with fluffy white clouds blowing across it.
“No automatics,” said Hull, looking around.
“That's odd. But maybe the ground-level adjustments—let's go topside.” Saunders scrambled up the sloping walls of the pit.
It was obviously the half-filled basement of the old house, which must somehow have been destroyed in the eighty years since his last visit. The ground-level machine in the projector automatically materialized it on the exact surface whenever it emerged. There would be no sudden falls or sudden burials under risen earth. Nor would there be disastrous materializations inside something solid; mass-sensitive circuits prevented the machine from halting whenever solid matter occupied its own space. Liquid or gas molecules could get out of the way fast enough.
Saunders stood in tall, wind-rippled grass and looked over the serene landscape of upper New York State. Nothing had changed, the river and the forested hills beyond it were the same, the sun was bright and clouds shone in the heavens.
No—no, before God! Where was the village?
House gone, town gone—what had happened? Had people simply moved away, or …
He looked back down to the basement. Only a few minutes ago—a hundred years in the past—he had stood there in a tangle of battered apparatus, and Doc and Eve—and now it was a pit with wild grass covering the raw earth. An odd desolation tugged at him.
Was he still alive today? Was … Eve? The gerontology of 1973 made it entirely possible, but one never knew. And he didn't want to find out.
“Must'a give the country back to the Indians,” grunted Sam Hull.
The prosaic wisecrack restored a sense of balance. After all, any sensible man knew that things changed with time. There would be good and evil in the future as there had been in the past. “And they lived happily ever after” was pure myth. The important thing was change, an unending flux out of which all could come. And right now there was a job to do.
They scouted around in the grass, but there was no trace of the small automatic projectors. Hull scowled thoughtfully. “You know,” he said, “I think they started back and blew out on the way.”
You must be right,” nodded Saunders. “We can't have arrived more than a few minutes after their return-point.” He started back toward the big machine. “Let's take our observation and get out.”
They set up their astronomical equipment and took readings on the declining sun. Waiting for night, they cooked a meal on a camp stove and sat while a cricket-chirping dusk deepened around them.
“I like this future,” said Hull. “It's peaceful. Think I'll retire here—or now—in my old age.”
The thought of transtemporal resorts made Saunders grin. But—who knew? Maybe!
The stars wheeled grandly overhead. Saunders jotted down figures on right ascension, declination, and passage times. From that, they could calculate later, almost to the minute, how far the machine had taken them. They had not moved in space at all, of course, relative to the surface of the Earth. “Absolute space” was an obsolete fiction, and as far as the projector was concerned Earth was the immobile center of the universe.
They waded through dew-wet grass back down to the ma chine. “We'll try ten-year stops, looking for the automatics,” said Saunders. “If we don't find ’em that way, to hell with them. I'm hungry.”
2063—it was raining into the pit.
2053—sunlight and emptiness.
2043—the pit was fresher now, and a few rotting timbers lay half buried in the ground.
Saunders scowled at the meters. “She's drawing more power than she should,” he said.
2023—the house had obviously burned; charred stumps of wood were in sight. And the projector had roared with a skull-cracking intensity of power; energy drained from the batteries like water from a squeezed sponge; a resistor was beginning to glow.
They checked the circuits, inch by inch, wire by wire. Nothing was out of order.
“Let's go.” Hull's face was white.
It was a battle to leap the next ten years. It took half an hour of bawling, thundering, tortured labor for the projector to fight backward. Radiated energy made the cabin unendurably hot.
2013—the fire-blackened basement still stood. On its floor lay two small cylinders, tarnished with some years of weather ing.
“The automatics got a little farther back,” said Hull. “Then they quit, and just lay here.”
Saunders examined them. When he looked up from his instruments, his face was grim with the choking fear that was rising within him. “Drained,” he said. “Batteries completely dead. They used up all their energy reserves.”
“What in the devil is this?” It was almost a snarl from Hull.
“I—don't—know. There seems to be some kind of resistance that increases the further back we try to go—”
“Come on!”
“But—”
“Come on, God damn it!”
Saunders shrugged hopelessly.
It took two hours to fight back five years. Then Saunders stopped the projector. His voice shook.
“No go, Sam. We've used up three quarters of our stored ener gy—and the farther back we go, the more we use per year. It seems to be some sort of high-order exponential function.”
“So we'd never make it. At this rate, our batteries will be dead before we get back another ten years.” Saunders looked ill. “It's some effect the theory didn't allow for, some accelerating increase in power requirements the farther back into the past we go. For twenty-year hops or less, the energy increases roughly as the square of the number of years traversed. But it must actually be something like an exponential curve, which starts building up fast and furious beyond a certain point. We haven't enough power left in the batteries!”
“If we could recharge them—”
“We don't have such equipment with us. But maybe—”
They climbed out of the ruined basement and looked eagerly toward the river. There was no sign of the village. It must have been torn down or otherwise destroyed still further back in the past at a point they'd been through.
“No help there,” said Saunders.
“We can look for a place. There must be people somewhere!”
“No doubt.” Saunders fought for calm. “But we could spend a long time looking for them, you know. And—” his voice wavered, “Sam, I'm not sure even recharging at intervals would help. It looks very much to me as if the curve of energy consumption is approaching a vertical asymptote.”
“Talk English, will you?” Hull's grin was forced.
“I mean that beyond a certain number of years an infinite amount of energy may be required. Like the Einsteinian concept of light as the limiting velocity. As you approach the speed of light, the energy needed to accelerate increases ever more rapidly. You'd need infinite energy to get beyond the speed of light—which is just a fancy way of saying you can't do it. The same thing may apply to time as well as space.”
“You mean—we can't ever get back?”
“I don't know.” Saunders looked desolately around at the smiling landscape. “I could be wrong. But I'm horribly afraid I'm right.”
Hull swore, “What're we going to do about it?”
“We've got two choices,” Saunders said. “One, we can hunt for people, recharge our batteries, and keep trying. Two, we can go into the future.”
“The future!”
“Uh-huh. Sometime in the future, they
ought to know more about such things than we do. They may know a way to get around this effect. Certainly they could give us a powerful enough engine so that, if energy is all that's needed, we can get back. A small atomic generator, for instance.”
Hull stood with his head, bent turning the thought over in his mind. There was a meadowlark singing somewhere, maddeningly sweet.
Saunders forced a harsh laugh. “But the very first thing on the agenda,” he said, “is breakfast!”
The food was tasteless. They ate in a heavy silence, choking the stuff down. But in the end they looked at each other with a common resolution.
Hull grinned and stuck out a hairy paw. “It's a hell of a round about way to get home,” he said, “but I'm for it.”
Saunders clasped hands with him, wordlessly. They went back to the machine.
“And now where?” asked the mechanic
“It's two thousand eight,” said Saunders. “How about—well—two-thousand five-hundred A.D.?”
“Okay. It's a nice round number. Anchors aweigh!”
The machine thrummed and shook. Saunders was gratified to notice the small power consumption as the years and decades fled by. At that rate, they had energy enough to travel to the end of the world.
Eve, Eve, I'll come back. I'll come back if I have to go ahead to Judgment Day …
2500 A.D. The machine blinked into materialization on top of a low hill—the pit had filled in during the intervening centuries. Pale, hurried sunlight flashed through wind-driven rain clouds into the hot interior.
“Come,” said Hull. “We haven't got all day.”
He picked up the automatic rifle. “What's the idea?” exclaimed Saunders.
“Eve was right the first time,” said Hull grimly. “Buckle on that pistol, Mart.”
Saunders strapped the heavy weapon to his thigh. The metal was cold under his fingers.
The End Of The World Page 31
