“Permit me to introduce myself. I am Hamalon Avard, dean of this branch of the college.” He raised bushy gray eyebrows in polite inquiry.
They gave their names, and Avard bowed ceremoniously. A slim girl, whose scanty dress caused Belgotai's eyes to widen, brought a tray of sandwiches and a beverage not unlike tea. Saunders suddenly realized how hungry and tired he was. He collapsed into a seat that molded itself to his contours and looked dully at Avard.
Their story came out, and the dean nodded. “I thought you were time travelers,” he said. “But this is a matter of great interest. The archeology departments will want to speak to you, if you will be so kind—”
“Can you help us?” asked Saunders bluntly. “Can you fix our machine so it will reverse?”
“Alas, no. I am afraid our physics holds no hope for you. I can consult the experts, but I am sure there has been no change in spatiotemporal theory since Priogan's reformulation. According to it, the energy needed to travel into the past increases tremendously with the period covered. The deformation of world lines, you see. Beyond a period of about seventy years, infinite energy is required.”
Saunders nodded dully. “I thought so. Then there's no hope?”
“Not in this time, I am afraid. But science is advancing rapidly. Contact with alien culture in the galaxy has proved an immense stimulant—”
“Yuh have interstellar travel?” exploded Belgotai. “Yuh can travel to de stars?”
“Yes, of course. The faster-than-light drive was worked out over five hundred years ago on the basis of Priogan's modified relativity theory. It involves warping through higher dimensions—but you have more urgent problems than scientific theories.”
“Not Ih!” said Belgotai fiercely. “If Ih can get put among de stars—dere must be wars dere—”
“Alas, yes, the rapid expansion of the frontier has thrown the galaxy into chaos. But I do not think you could get passage on a spaceship. In fact, the Council will probably order your temporal deportation as unintegrated individuals. The sanity of Sol will be in danger otherwise.”
“Why, yuh—” Belgotai snarled and reached for his gun. Saunders clapped a hand on the warrior's arm.
“Take it easy, you bloody fool,” he said furiously. We can't fight a whole planet. Why should we? There'll be other ages.”
Belgotai relaxed, but his eyes were still angry.
They stayed at the college for two days. Avard and his colleagues were courteous, hospitable, eager to hear what the travelers had to tell of their periods. They provided food and living quarters and much-needed rest. They even pleaded Belgotai's case to the Solar Council, via telescreen. But the answer was inexorable: the galaxy already had too many barbarians. The travelers would have to go.
Their batteries were taken out of the machine for them and a small atomic engine with nearly limitless energy reserves installed in its place. Avard gave them a psychophone for communication with whoever they met in the future. Everyone was very nice and considerate. But Saunders found himself reluctantly agreeing with Belgotai. He didn't care much for these over-civilized gentlefolk. He didn't belong in this age.
Avard bade them grave goodbye. “It is strange to see you go,” he said. “It is a strange thought that you will still be traveling long after my cremation, that you will see things I cannot dream of.” Briefly, something stirred in his face. “In a way I envy you.” He turned away quickly, as if afraid of the thought. “Goodbye and good fortune.”
4300 A.D. The campus buildings were gone, but small, elabo rate summerhouses had replaced them. Youths and girls in scanty rainbow-hued dress crowded around the machine.
“You are time travelers?” asked one of the young men, wide-eyed. Saunders nodded, feeling too tired for speech.
“Time travelers!” A girl squealed in delight.
“I don't suppose you have any means of traveling into the past these days?” asked Saunders hopelessly.
“Not that I know of. But please come, stay for a while, tell us about your journeys. This is the biggest lark we've had since the ship came from Sirius.”
There was no denying the eager insistence. The women, in particular, crowded around, circling them in a ring of soft arms, laughing and shouting and pulling them away from the machine. Belgotai grinned. “Let's stay de night,” he suggested.
Saunders didn't feel like arguing the point. There was time enough, he thought bitterly. All the time in the world.
It was a night of revelry. Saunders managed to get a few facts. Sol was a galactic backwater these days, stuffed with mercantile wealth and guarded by nonhuman mercenaries against the interstellar raid ers and conquerors. This region was one of many playgrounds for the children of the great merchant families, living for generations off inherited riches. They were amiable kids, but there was a mental and physical softness about them, and a deep inward weariness from a meaningless round of increasingly stale pleasure. Decadence.
Saunders finally sat alone under a moon that glittered with the diamond-points of domed cities, beside a softly lapping artificial lake, and watched the constellations wheel overhead—the far suns that man had conquered without mastering himself. He thought of Eve and wanted to cry, but the hollowness in his breast was dry and cold.
Belgotai had a thumping hangover in the morning, which a drink offered by one of the women removed. He argued for a while about staying in this age. Nobody would deny him passage this time; they were eager for fighting men out in the galaxy. But the fact that Sol was rarely visited now, that he might have to wait years, finally decided him on continuing.
“Dis won’ go on much longer,” he said. “Sol is too tempting a prize, an’ mercenaries aren’ allays loyal. Sooner or later, dere'll be war on Eart’ again.”
Saunders nodded dispiritedly. He hated to think of the blasting energies that would devour a peaceful and harmless folk, the looting and murdering and enslaving, but history was that way. It was littered with the graves of pacifists.
The bright scene swirled into grayness. They drove ahead.
4400 A.D. A villa was burning, smoke and flame reaching up into the clouded sky. Behind it stood the looming bulk of a ray-scarred spaceship, and around it boiled a vortex of men, huge bearded men in helmets and cuirasses, laughing as they bore out golden loot and struggling captives. The barbarians had come!
The two travelers leaped back into the machine. Those weapons could fuse it to a glowing mass. Saunders swung the main-drive switch far over.
“We'd better make a longer jump,” Saunders said, as the needle crept past the century mark. “Can't look for much scientific progress in a dark age. I'll try for five thousand A.D.”
His mind carried the thought on: Will there ever be progress of the sort we must have? Eve, will I ever see you again? As if his yearning could carry over the abyss of millennia: Don't mourn me too long, my dearest. In all the bloody ages of human history, your happiness is all that ultimately matters.
As the needle approached six centuries, Saunders tried to ease down the switch. Tried!
“What's the matter?” Belgotai leaned over his shoulder.
With a sudden cold sweat along his ribs, Saunders tugged harder. The switch was immobile—the projector wouldn't stop. “Out of order?” asked Belgotai anxiously.
“No—it's the automatic mass-detector. We'd be annihilated if we emerged in the same space with solid matter. The detector prevents the projector from stopping if it senses such a structure.” Saunders grinned savagely. “Some damned idiot must have built a house right where we are!”
The needle passed its limit, and still they droned on through a featureless grayness. Saunders reset the dial and noted the first half millennium. It was nice, though not necessary, to know what year it was when they emerged.
He wasn't worried at first. Man's works were so horribly impermanent; he thought with a sadness of the cities and civiliza tions he had seen rise and spend their little hour and sink back into the night and chaos of time. But
after a thousand years …
Two thousand …
Three thousand …
Belgotai's face was white and tense in the dull glow of the instrument panel. “How long to go?” he whispered.
“I—don't—know.”
Within the machine, the long minutes passed while the projector hummed its song of power and two men stared with hypnotized fascination at the creeping record of centuries.
For twenty thousand years that incredible thing stood. In the year 25,296 A.D., the switch suddenly went down under Saunders’ steady tug. The machine flashed into reality, tilted, and slid down a few feet before coming to rest. Wildly, they opened the door.
The projector lay on a stone block big as a small house, whose ultimate slipping from its place had freed them. It was halfway up a pyramid.
A monument of gray stone, a tetrahedron a mile to a side and a half a mile high The outer casing had worn away, or been removed, so that the tremendous blocks stood naked to the weather. Soil had drifted up onto it, grass and trees grew on its titanic slopes. Their roots, and wind and rain and frost, were slowly crumbling the artificial hill to earth again, but still it dominated the landscape.
A defaced carving leered out from a tangle of brush. Saunders looked at it and looked away, shuddering. No human being had ever carved that thing.
The countryside around was altered; he couldn't see the old river and there was a lake glimmering in the distance which had not been there before. The hills seemed lower, and forest covered them. It was a wild, primeval scene, but there was a spaceship standing near the base, a monster machine with its nose rearing skyward and a sunburst blazon on its hull. And there were men working nearby.
Saunders’ shout rang in the still air. He and Belgotai scrambled down the steep slopes of earth, clawing past trees and vines. Men!
No—not all men. A dozen great shining engines were toiling without supervision at the foot of the pyramid—robots. And of the group that turned to stare at the travelers, two were squat, blue-furred, with snouted faces and six-fingered hands.
Saunders realized with an unexpectedly eerie shock that he was seeing extraterrestrial intelligence. But it was to the men that he faced.
They were all tall, with aristocratically refined features and a calm that seemed inbred. Their clothing was impossible to describe, it was like a rainbow shimmer around them, never the same in its play of color and shape. So, thought Saunders, so must the old gods have looked on high Olympus, beings greater and more beautiful than man.
But it was a human voice that called to them, a deep, well-modulated tone in a totally foreign language. Saunders remembered exasperatedly that he had forgotten the psychophone, but one of the blue-furred aliens were already fetching a round, knob-studded globe out of which the familiar translating voice seemed to come:
“… time travelers.”
“From the very remote past, obviously,” said another man. Damn him, damn them all, they weren't any more excited than at the bird that rose, startled, from the long grass. You'd think time travelers would at least be worth shaking by the hand.
“Listen,” snapped Saunders, realizing in the back of his mind that his annoyance was a reaction against the awesomeness of the company, “we're in trouble. Our machine won't carry us back, and we have to find a period of time that knows how to reverse the effect. Can you do it?”
One of the aliens shook his animal head. “No,” he said. “There is no way known to physics of getting further back than about seventy years. Beyond that, the required energy approaches infinity and—”
Saunders groaned. “We know it,” said Belgotai harshly.
“At least you must rest,” said one of the men in a more kindly tone. “It will be interesting to hear your story.”
“I've told it to too many people in the last few millennia,” rasped Saunders. “Let's hear yours for a change.”
Two of the strangers exchanged low-voiced words. Saunders could almost translate them himself: “Barbarians—childish emotion al pattern—well, humor them for a while.”
“This is an archeological expedition, excavating the pyramid,” said one of the men patiently. “We are from the Galactic Institute, Sarlan-sector branch. I am Lord Arsfel of Astracyr, and these are my subordinates. The nonhumans, as you may wish to know, are from the planet Quulhan, whose sun is not visible from Terra.”
Despite himself, Saunders’ awed gaze turned to the stupendous mass looming over them. “Who built it?” he breathed.
“The Ixchulhi made such structures on planets they conquered, no one knows why. But then, no one knows what they were or where they came from or where they ultimately went. It is hoped that some of the answers may be found in their pyra mids.”
The atmosphere grew more relaxed. Deftly, the men of the expedition got Saunders's and Belgotai's stories and what informa tion about their almost prehistoric periods they cared for. In ex change, something of history was offered to them.
After the Ixchulhi's ruinous wars, the galaxy had made a surprisingly rapid comeback. New techniques of mathematical psychology made it possible to unite the peoples of a billion worlds and rule them effectively. The Galactic Empire was egalitarian—it had to be, for one of its mainstays was the fantastically old and evolved race of the planet called Vro-Hi by men.
It was peaceful, prosperous, colorful with diversity of races and cultures, expanding in science and the arts. It had already endured for ten thousand years, and there seemed no doubt in Arsfel's calm mind that it could endure forever. The barbarians along the galactic periphery and out in the Magellanic Clouds? Nonsense! The em pire would get around to civilizing them in due course; meanwhile they were only a nuisance.
But Sol could almost be called one of the barbarian suns, though it lay within the Imperial boundaries. Civilization was concentrated near the center of the galaxy, and Sol lay in what was actually a remote and thinly starred region of space. A few primitive landsmen still lived on its planets and had infrequent intercourse with the nearer stars, but they hardly counted. The human race had almost forgotten its ancient home.
Somehow the picture was saddening to the American. He thought of old Earth spinning on her lonely way through the emptiness of space, he thought of the great arrogant empire and of all the mighty dominions which had fallen to dust through the millennia. But when he ventured to suggest that this civilization, too, was not immortal, he was immediately snowed under with figures, facts, logic, the curious paramathematical symbolism of modern mass psychology. It could be shown rigorously that the present set-up was inherently stable—and already ten thousand years of history had given no evidence to upset that science …
“I give up,” said Saunders. “I can't argue with you.”
They were shown through the spaceship's immense interior, the luxurious apartments of the expedition, the looming intricate machinery which did its own thinking. Arsfel tried to show them his art, his recorded music, his psychobooks, but it was no use, they didn't have the understanding.
Savages! Could an Australian aborigine have appreciated Rem brandt, Beethoven, Kant, or Einstein? Could he have lived happily in sophisticated New York society?
“We'd best go,” muttered Belgotai. “We don't belong heah.”
Saunders nodded. Civilization had gone too far for them, they could never be more than frightened pensioners in its hugeness. Best to get on their way again.
“I would advise you to leap ahead for long intervals,” said Arsfel. “Galactic civilization won't have spread out this far for many thou sands of years, and certainly whatever native culture Sol develops won't be able to help you.” He smiled. “It doesn't matter if you overshoot the time when the process you need is invented. The records won't be lost, I assure you. From here on, you are certain of encountering only peace and enlightenment … unless, of course, the barbarians of Terra get hostile, but then you can always leave them behind. Sooner or later, there will be true civilization here to help you.”
“Tell me honestly,” said Saunders. “Do you think the negative time machine will ever be invented?”
One of the beings from Quulhan shook his strange head. “I doubt it,” he said gravely. “We would have had visitors from the future.”
“They might not have cared to see your time,” argued Saunders desperately. “They'd have complete records of it. So they'd go back to investigate more primitive ages, where their appearance might easily pass unnoticed.”
“You may be right,” said Arsfel. His tone was disconcertingly like that with which an adult comforts a child by a white lie.
“Le's go!” snarled Belgotai.
In 26000 A.D. the forests still stood and the pyramid had become a high hill where trees nodded and rustled in the wind.
In 27000 A.D. a small village of wood and stone houses stood among smiling grain fields.
In 28000 A.D. men were tearing down the pyramid, quarrying it for stone. But its huge bulk was not gone before 30000 A.D., and a small city had been built from it.
Minutes ago, thought Saunders grayly, they had been talking to Lord Arsfel of Astracyr, and now he was five thousand years in his grave.
In 31000, A.D. they materialized on one of the broad lawns that reached between the towers of a high and proud city. Aircraft swarmed overhead and a spaceship, small beside Arsfel's but nonetheless impressive, was standing nearby.
“Looks like de empire's got heah,” said Belgotai.
“I don't know,” said Saunders. “But it looks peaceful, anyway. Let's go out and talk to people.”
They were received by tall, stately women in white robes of classic lines. It seemed that the matriarchy now ruled Sol, and would they please conduct themselves as befitted the inferior sex? No, the empire hadn't ever gotten out here; Sol paid tribute, and there was an Imperial legate at Sirius, but the actual boundaries of Galactic culture hadn't changed for the past three millennia. Solar civilization was strictly home-grown and obviously superior to the alien influence of the Vro-Hi.
The End Of The World Page 33
