And so she had crossed a thousand starry light years to the link lonely sun which had been her home. She brought ships, machines, troops. Sol would have a military base sufficient to protect it. Climate engineers would drive the glacial winter of Earth back to its poles and begin the resettlement of the other planets. There would be schools, factories, civilization, Sol would have cause to remember its empress.
Saunders came along because he couldn't quite endure the thought of leaving Earth altogether without farewell. Vargor grown ever more silent and moody, joined them, but otherwis,
The old comradeship of Brontothor was dissolving in the sudden fury of work and war and complexity, which claimed them.
And so they stood again in the old ruined castle, Saunders and Taury, looking out at the night of Earth.
It was late, all others seemed to be asleep. Below the balcony the black walls dropped dizzily to the gulf of night that was the main courtyard. Beyond it, a broken section of outer wall showed snow lying white and mystic under the moon. The stars were huge and frosty, flashing and glittering with cold crystal light above the looming pines, grandeur and arrogance and remoteness wheeling enormously across the silent sky. The moon rode high, its scarred old face the only familiarity from Saunders's age, its argent radiance flooding down on the snow to shatter in a million splinters.
It was quiet, quiet, sound seemed to have frozen to death in the bitter windless cold. Saunders had stood alone, wrapped in furs with his breath shining ghostly from his nostrils, looking out on the silent winter world and thinking his own thoughts. He had heard a soft footfall and turned to see Taury approaching.
“I couldn't sleep,” she said.
She came out onto the balcony to stand beside him. The moon light was white on her face, shimmering faintly from her eyes and hair. She seemed a dim goddess of the night.
“What were you thinking, Martin?” she asked after a while.
“Oh—I don't know,” he said. “Just dreaming a little, I suppose. It's a strange thought to me, to have left my own time forever and now to be leaving even my own world.”
She nodded gravely. “I know. I feel the same way.” Her low voice dropped to a whisper. “I didn't have to come back in person, you know. They need me more at Polaris. But I thought I deserved this last farewell to the days when we fought with our own hands, and fared between the stars, when we were a small band of sworn comrades whose dreams outstripped our strength. It was hard and bitter, yes, but I don't think we'll have time for laughter any more. When you work for a mil lion stars, you don't have a chance to see one peasant's wrin kled face light with a deed of kindness you did, or hear him tell you what you did wrong—the world will all be strangers to us—”
For another moment, silence under the far cold stars, then, “Martin—I am so lonely now.”
He took her in his arms. Her lips were cold against his, cold with the cruel silent chill of the night, but she answered him with a fierce yearning.
“I think I love you, Martin,” she said after a very long time. Suddenly she laughed, a clear and lovely music echoing from the frosty towers of Brontothor. “Oh, Martin, I shouldn't have been afraid. We'll never be lonely, not ever again—”
The moon had sunk far toward the dark horizon when he took her back to her rooms. He kissed her goodnight and went down the booming corridor toward his own chambers.
His head was awhirl—he was drunk with the sweetness and won der of it, he felt like singing and laughing aloud and embracing the whole starry universe. Taury, Taury, Taury!
“Martin.”
He paused. There was a figure standing before his door, a tall slender form wrapped in a dark cloak. The dull light of a fluoroglobe threw the face into sliding shadow and tormented highlights. Vargor.
“What is it?” he asked.
The prince's hand came up, and Saunders saw the blunt muzzle of a stun pistol gaping at him. Vargor smiled, lopsidedly and sorrowfully. “I'm sorry, Martin,” he said.
Saunders stood paralyzed with unbelief. Vargor—why, Vargor had fought beside him; they'd saved each other's lives, laughed and worked and lived together—Vargor!
The gun flashed. There was a crashing in Saunders's head and he tumbled into illimitable darkness.
He awoke very slowly, every nerve tingling with the pain of returning sensation. Something was restraining him. As his vision cleared, he saw that he was lying bound and gagged on the floor of his time projector.
The time machine—he'd all but forgotten it, left it standing in a shed while he went out to the stars, he'd never thought to have another look at it. The time machine!
Vargor stood in the open door, a fluoroglobe in one hand lighting his haggard face. His hair fell in disarray past his tired, handsome features, and his eyes were as wild as the low words that spilled from his mouth.
“I'm sorry, Martin, I am. I like you, and you've done the empire such a service as it can never forget, and this is as low a trick as one man can ever play on another. But I have to. I'll be haunted by the thought of this night all my life, but I have to.”
Saunders tried to move, snarling incoherently through his gag. Vargor shook his head. “Oh, no, Martin, I can't risk letting you make an outcry. If I'm to do evil, I'll at least do a competent job of it.
“I love Taury, you see. I've loved her ever since I first met her, when I came from the stars with a fighting fleet to her father's court and saw her standing there with the frost crackling through her hair and those gray eyes shining at me. I love her so it's like a pain in me. I can't be away from her, I'd pull down the cosmos for her sake. And I thought she was slowly coming to love me.
“And tonight I saw you two on the balcony, and knew I'd lost. Only, I can't give up! Our breed has fought the galaxy for a dream. Martin—it's not in us ever to stop fighting while life is in us. Fighting by any means, for whatever is dear and precious—but fighting!”
Vargor made a gesture of deprecation. “I don't want power, Martin, believe me. The consort's job will be hard and unglamorous, galling to a man of spirit—but if that's the only way to have her then so be it. And I do honestly believe, right or wrong, that I'm better for her and for the empire than you. You don't really belong here, you know. You don't have the tradition, the feeling, the training—you don't even have the biological heritage of five thousand years. Taury may care for you now, but think twenty years ahead!”
Vargor smiled wryly. “I'm taking a chance, of course. If you do find a means of negative time travel and come back here, it will be disgrace and exile for me. It would be safer to kill you. But I'm not quite that much of a scoundrel. I'm giving you your chance. At worst, you should escape into the time when the Second Empire is in its glorious bloom, a happier age than this. And if you do find a means to come back—well, remember what I said about your not belonging, and try to reason with clarity and kindness. Kindness to Taury, Martin.”
He lifted the fluoroglobe, casting its light over the dim interior of the machine. “So it's goodbye, Martin, and I hope you won't hate me too much. It should take you several thousand years to work free and stop the machine. I've equipped it with weapons, supplies, everything I think you may need for any eventuality. But I'm sure you'll emerge in a greater and more peaceful culture, and be happier there.”
His voice was strangely tender, all of a sudden. “Goodbye, Martin my comrade. And—good luck!”
He opened the main-drive switch and stepped out as the projector began to warm up. The door clanged shut behind him.
Saunders writhed on the floor, cursing with a brain that was a black cauldron of bitterness. The great drone of the projector rose, he was on his way—oh no—stop the machine, God, set me free before it's too late!
The plastic cords cut his wrists. He was lashed to a stanchion, unable to reach the switch with any part of his body. His groping fingers slid across the surface of a knot, the nails clawing for a hold. The machine roared with full power, driving ahead through the vastness of time.<
br />
Vargor had bound him skillfully. It took him a long time to get free. Toward the end he went slowly, not caring, knowing with a dull knowledge that he was already more thousands of irretrievable years into the future than his dials would register.
He climbed to his feet, plucked the gag from his mouth, and looked blankly out at the faceless gray. The century needle was hard against its stop. He estimated vaguely that he was some ten thousand years into the future already.
Ten thousand years!
He yanked down the switch with a raging burst of savagery.
It was dark outside. He stood stupidly for a moment before he saw water seeping into the cabin around the door. Water—he was under water—short circuits! Frantically, he slammed the switch forward again.
He tasted the water on the floor. It was salt. Sometime in that ten thousand years, for reasons natural or artificial, the sea had come in and covered the site of Brontothor.
A thousand years later he was still below its surface. Two thou sand, three thousand, ten thousand …
Taury, Taury! For twenty thousand years she had been dust on an alien planet. And Belgotai was gone with his wry smile, Hunda's staunchness, even the Dreamer must long ago have descended into darkness. The sea rolled over dead Brontothor, and he was alone.
He bowed his head on his arms and wept.
For three million years the ocean lay over Brontothor's land. And Saunders drove onward.
He stopped at intervals to see if the waters had gone. Each time the frame of the machine groaned with pressure and the sea poured in through the crack of the door. Otherwise he sat dully in the throbbing loneliness, estimating time covered by his own watch and the known rate of the projector, not caring any more about dates or places.
Several times he considered stopping the machine, letting the sea burst in and drown him. There would be peace in its depths, sleep and forgetting. But no, it wasn't in him to quit that easily. Death was his friend, death would always be there waiting for his call.
But Taury was dead.
Time grayed to its end. In the four millionth year, he stopped the machine and discovered that there was dry air around him.
He was in a city. But it was not such a city as he had ever seen or imagined, he couldn't follow the wild geometry of the titanic structures that loomed about him and they were never the same. The place throbbed and pulsed with incredible forces, it wavered and blurred in a strangely unreal light. Great devastating energies flashed and roared around him—lightning come to Earth. The air hissed and stung with their booming passage.
The thought was a shout filling his skull, blazing along his nerves, too mighty a thought for his stunned brain to do more than grope after meaning:
CREATURE FROM OUT OF TIME, LEAVE THIS PLACE AT ONCE OR THE FORCES WE USE WILL DESTROY YOU!
Through and through him that mental vision seared, down to the very molecules of his brain, his life lay open to them in a white flame of incandescence.
“Can you help me?” he cried to the gods. “Can you send me back through time?”
MAN, THERE IS NO WAY TO TRAVEL FAR BACKWARD IN TIME, IT IS INHERENTLY IMPOSSIBLE. YOU MUST GO ON TO THE VERY END OF THE UNIVERSE, AND BEYOND THE END, BECAUSE THAT WAY LIES—
He screamed with the pain of unendurably great thought and concept filling his human brain.
GO ON, MAN, GO ON! BUT YOU CANNOT SURVIVE IN THAT MA CHINE AS IT IS. I WILL CHANGE IT FOR YOU … GO!
The time projector started again by itself. Saunders fell forward into a darkness that roared and flashed.
Grimly, desperately, like a man driven by demons, Saunders hurtled into the future.
There could be no gainsaying the awful word which had been laid on him. The mere thought of the gods had engraven itself on the very tissue of his brain. Why he should go on to the end of time, he could not imagine, nor did he care. But go on he must!
The machine had been altered. It was airtight now, and experi ment showed the window to be utterly unbreakable. Something had been done to the projector so that it hurled him forward at an incredible rate, millions of years passed while a minute or two ticked away within the droning shell.
But what had the gods been?
He would never know. Beings from beyond the galaxy, beyond the very universe—the ultimately evolved descendants of man—something at whose nature he could not even guess—there was no way of telling. This much was plain: whether it had become extinct or had changed into something else, the human race was gone. Earth would never feel human tread again.
I wonder what became of the Second Empire. I hope it had a long and good life. Or—could that have been its unimaginable end product?
The years reeled past, millions, billions mounting on each other while Earth spun around her star and the galaxy aged. Saunders fled onward.
He stopped now and then, unable to resist a glimpse of the world and its tremendous history.
A hundred million years in the future, he looked out on great sheets of flying snow. The gods were gone. Had they too died, or abandoned Earth—perhaps for an altogether different plane of existence? He would never know.
There was a being coming through the storm. The wind flung the snow about him in whirling, hissing clouds. Frost was in his gray fur. He moved with a lithe, unhuman grace, carrying a curved staff at whose tip was a blaze like a tiny sun.
Saunders hailed him through the psychophone, letting his amplified voice shout through the blizzard: “Who are you? What are you doing on Earth?”
The being carried a stone axe in one hand and wore a string of crude beads about his neck. But he stared with bold yellow eyes at the machine and the psychophone brought his harsh scream: “You must be from the far past, one of the earlier cycles.”
“They told me to go on, back almost a hundred million years ago. They told me to go to the end of time!”
The psychophone hooted with metallic laughter. “If they told you so—then go!”
The being walked on into the storm.
Saunders flung himself ahead. There was no place on Earth for him anymore, he had no choice but to go on.
A billion years in the future there was a city standing on a plain where grass grew that was blue and glassy and tinkled with a high crystalline chiming as the wind blew through it. But the city had never been built by humans, and it warned him away with a voice he could not disobey.
Then the sea came, and for a long time thereafter he was trapped within a mountain; he had to drive onward till it had eroded back to the ground.
The sun grew hotter and whiter as the hydrogen-helium cycle increased its intensity. Earth spiraled slowly closer to it, the friction of gas and dust clouds in space taking their infinitesimal toll of its energy over billions of years.
How many intelligent races had risen on Earth and had their day and died since the age when man first came out of the jungle? At least, he thought tiredly, we were the first.
A hundred billion years in the future, the sun had used up its last reserves of nuclear reactions. Saunders looked out on a bare mountain scene, grim as the Moon—but the Moon had long ago fallen back toward its parent world and exploded into a meteoric rain. Earth faced its primary now; its day was as long as its year. Saunders saw part of the sun's huge blood-red disc shining wanly.
So goodbye, Sol, he thought. Goodbye, and thank you for many million years of warmth and light. Sleep well, old friend.
Some billions of years beyond, there was nothing but the elemental dark. Entropy had reached a maximum, the energy sources were used up, the universe was dead.
The universe was dead!
He screamed with the graveyard terror of it and flung the machine onward. Had it not been for the gods’ command, he might have let it hang there, might have opened the door to airlessness and absolute zero to die. But he had to go on. He had reached the end of all things, but he had to go on. Beyond the end of time—
Billions upon billions of years fled. Saunders lay in his ma chine,
sunk into an apathetic coma. Once he roused himself to eat, feeling the sardonic humor of the situation—the last living creature, the last free energy in all the cindered cosmos, fixing a sandwich.
Many billions of years in the future, Saunders paused again. He looked out into blackness. But with a sudden shock he discerned a far faint glow, the vaguest imaginable blur of light out in the heavens.
Trembling, he jumped forward another billion years. The light was stronger now, a great sprawling radiance swirling inchoately in the sky.
The universe was reforming.
It made sense, thought Saunders, fighting for self-control. Space had expanded to some kind of limit, now it was collapsing in on itself to start the cycle anew—the cycle that had been repeated none knew how many times in the past. The universe was mortal, but it was a phoenix that would never really die.
But he was disturbingly mortal, and suddenly he was free of his death wish. At the very least he wanted to see what the next time around looked like. But the universe would, according to the best theories of twentieth-century cosmology, collapse to what was virtually a point-source, a featureless blaze of pure energy out of which the primal atoms would be reformed. If he wasn't to be devoured in that raging furnace, he'd better leap a long ways ahead. A hell of a long ways!
He grinned with sudden reckless determination and plunged the switch forward.
Worry came back. How did he know that a planet would be formed under him? He might come out in open space, or in the heart of a sun … Well, he'd have to risk that. The gods must have foreseen and allowed for it.
He came out briefly—and flashed back into time-drive. The planet was still molten!
Some geological ages later, he looked out at a spurning gray rain, washing with senseless power from a hidden sky, covering naked rocks with a raging swirl of white water. He didn't go out; the atmosphere would be unbreathable until plants had liberated enough oxygen.
On and on! Sometimes he was under seas, sometimes on land. He saw strange jungles like overgrown ferns and mosses rise and wither in the cold of a glacial age and rise again in altered life-form.
The End Of The World Page 36
