by Anthology
In the Middle Pleistocene, anything that was frightening was dangerous too. The idea of fear for a thrill did not exist. The idea of a thrill did not exist, either. To be frightened was to be in mortal danger. In the distance I could hear the sounds of sirens and an increasingly large crowd. Els was like some huge cat, a dangerous predator who was stronger and more of a carnivore than I, but for all that she was curiously vulnerable.
She followed me into the clinic’s interior, holding my arm tightly and cowering against me. The lights had been dimmed and the corridors cleared. We walked briskly. Someone must have told the waiting crowd to be silent, but we could still hear the helicopter’s engine. Els kept warning me about cave bears. We walked out through the front doors into daylight—and the waiting crowd roared.
Els panicked and tried to drag me back inside, but the doors had already been closed and locked behind us. Microphone booms, cameras, flashing lights, the helicopter, guards and police with batons, more people than Els had ever seen in her life, even a press helicopter approaching over the rooftops. Els tried to drag me across the lawn. I tried to stop her but she was too strong. Guards broke ranks to block her path and journalists surged through the breach in the line.
“Carr! Tek orr brii!” she shouted.
I dodged around in front of her, pulled my hand free from Els and tried to wave the approaching mob back. There was a loud pop and Els ceased to exist. I turned to see her cloak collapsed on the grass, along with her wooden hair pins scattered, an ankle beacon-circlet, and a necklace of paperclips.
That turned out to be the beginning of a very long day. Garces, Tormes, and Uncle Arturo were near-hysterical, predictably enough. The police already had the area sealed off, but it did them no good. Els had simply been snatched into thin air. Several dozen video cameras had caught the disappearance and although the angles were different, the event remained the same. In one frame Els was there, in the next she was gone and her cloak and hair feathers were falling.
Of all people directly involved, Marella alone was willingly giving interviews. Aliens had snatched Els away, she declared in triumph. Her abduction had been caught on camera. Aliens had brought her to twenty-first century Spain, then snatched away again. To Marella’s astonishment, her theory was given no more credence than several others. A public survey favoured a secret invisibility weapon being tested by the Americans, followed by a conspiracy by our own government, a divine vision, alien abduction, publicity for a new movie, and a student stunt.
For the rest of the week forensic teams studied the area in microscopic detail, scientists scanned the area for any trace of radiation, and the lawns became a place of pilgrimage for psychics, religious sects, and UFO experts. I viewed the videos hundreds of times, but there was nothing to learn from it. In one frame Els was in mid-stride; in the next she was gone and her cloak was being blown inwards by air rushing to fill the vacuum where her body had been. Astronomers scoured the skies, observers on the space station scanned near-Earth space on every frequency that their equipment could monitor, and warplanes were almost continuously in the skies over Cadiz, but nothing was found.
A full two weeks later I was going through the folder of papers and statements that I had been given in those last hours before Els had vanished. There was a copy of the absurd marketing proposal for some perfume that Tormes had told me about. She came a quarter of a million years for Moon Mist fragrances—and then I had it!
“Carr! Tek orr brii!” she had called to me. Carr. Walk to the full moon.
The Rhuun could walk through time. Els had been telling me that she was going to walk through time to the next full moon.
For a long time I barely moved a muscle, but I thought a great deal. There was massive development at the rear of Els’s brain. Why? For control of movement? For control of some subtle fabric in time itself? Step through time and escape your enemies. Escape famine, reach a time of plenty in the future. Why follow herds of wild cattle when you can wait for them to return by travelling through time? They skipped the long glacial epochs, they visited only warmer periods. The worst of the Saale and Weischel glaciations must have been no more than a series of walks through tens of thousands of years for them. If the hunting was bad, they walked a few decades. If there was too much competition from neanderthal or human tribes, they walked to when they have left or died out.
They visited the Spain of the neanderthals, saw the coming of humans, and saw the neanderthals vanish. That might well have made them wary of humans. Three thousand years ago they might even have seen the Phoenicians build western Europe’s first port city where Cadiz now stands, then watched as the Iberian Peninsula became part of the Roman Empire. With the development of farms came more trusting, placid cattle and sheep, although there were also farmers to guard them. However, all that the Rhuun had to do was walk a century or so into the future whenever farmers appeared with spears, swords and crossbows. Perhaps Ramoz’s shotgun was their first experience of a firearm, so they thought it would not be hard to defend their kill.
Homo sapiens evolved intelligence and had believed it to be the ultimate evolutionary advantage, but there are others. Mobility, for example. Birds can escape predators and find food by travelling through the third dimension. Homo rhuunis can do that by travelling into the fourth. Perhaps human brains are not suited to time walking, just as our hands and arms are better at making machines than flapping like wings. Could a time-walking machine be built? Would Els be vivisected by those wanting to find out?
What to do, how to do it? I felt a curiously strong bond with Els. I had a duty to protect her, and I owed no loyalty to Tormes, Marella or even my uncle. I was already outside the law, yet in a way that gave me a strangely powerful resolve. I had nothing to lose.
Nineteen days after Els vanished I was ready, waiting in a car beside the clinic’s lawns. A borrowed police car. My uncle was at home, fast asleep thanks to a couple of his own sleeping tablets in his coffee. His uniform was a rather baggy fit, but I had no choice. Every so often I started the engine, keeping it warm. On the lawns, a dozen or so UFO seekers loitered about with video cameras, mingling with the religious pilgrims, souvenir sellers, security guards, and tourists. People always returned after an alien abduction, so the popular wisdom went, and so those who followed Marella’s theory were ready. All but myself were concentrating on the skies, where the full moon was high.
There was a loud pop, and Els was suddenly standing naked on the lawn. Before the echoes of her arrival had died away I set the car’s lights flashing, then scrambled out and sprinted across the lawn calling, “Els! Els! Carr lan! Carr lan!”
She turned to me. Everyone else merely turned their cameras on us, not willing to interfere with the police.
“Els, hos Carr!” I cried as I took her by the arm. She did not want to approach the police car with its flashing lights. “Els, Carr lan!” I shouted, not sure if my intonation meant help or protect. She put a hand over her eyes and let me lead her.
Els had never been in a car before, and she curled up on the seat with her hands over her face. I pulled away from the clinic, turned a corner, and switched off the flashing lights. Two blocks further on, I transferred us to a hire car, and after twenty minutes we were clear of Puerto Real and in open country. Using Ramoz’s name I had located his farm in the municipal records, and by asking the locals in the area I had confirmed that the Field of Devils was indeed on the dead farmer’s land. It was a fifty-minute drive from the clinic. I had practised the trip several times.
All along Els had just needed help to return to the Field of Devils, help to move through space to where she could walk through time and rejoin her tribe in our future . . . or had she stayed because of affection for me? Whatever the case, she had only resorted to time-walking in sheer terror, when the journalists and camera crews had charged.
My mind was racing as I drove. Glancing down, I could see Els by the gleam of the dashboard lights. In a strange sense, I longed to call Tormes on my cellphone, to tell h
im what had really happened in the Middle Pleistocene. The heidelbergensians had spawned two new species, not just the neanderthals. With the Saale Glacial’s ice sheets approaching, the neanderthals went down the tried and true path of increased intelligence, improved toolmaking skills, and a stockier build to cope with the growing cold. Homo rhunnis evolved mobility in the fourth dimension instead. This instantly removed the trait from the gene pool—at least in normal time. Humanity had evolved later, but continued down the same path as the neanderthals.
In the distance I could see a helicopter’s searchlight. It was hovering where we were heading: the Field of Devils. I turned off the headlights, slowed, and drove on by moonlight, but the car had already been noticed. The light in the sky approached—then passed by. The pilot was heading for where he had last seen my lights. It gave us perhaps another two minutes. Els could easily escape through time and rejoin her tribe. I would be caught, but what could they do to me?
We were only half a mile from the Field of Devils when the helicopter’s searchlight caught the car. I braked hard, opened the door and pulled Els out after me.
“Els, tek var es bel!” I cried in Rhuun as we stood in the downwash of the rotor blades, imploring her to time walk two thousand midsummers away.
“Carr, Els kek!” she pleaded, grasping my arm.
Kek was new to me, but this was no time to be improving my grasp of Rhuun. The helicopter was descending, an amplified voice was telling me to drop my weapons and raise my hands.
“Els, tek var es bel!” I shouted again.
Els stepped out of the twenty-first century.
To me it had all been so obvious. The Rhuun could travel forward in time but take nothing with them. Their skin cloaks and tents, their stone scrapers, axes and knives, and their wooden spears and pins, everything was left behind when the time-walked. Only the person time-walking could pass into the future. What I had forgotten were the babies visible on Marella’s video. If babies had could be carried through time, so could adults.
The brightness of the helicopter’s spotlight vanished, replaced by the half-light of dawn. I was standing naked, in long grass, with Els still holding my hand. The air was chilly, but there was no wind. Els whistled, and awaited a reply. None came. The rolling hills were luridly green, and dotted with dusky sheep and cattle. It was an arcadia for Pleistocene hunters, but it was not the Pleistocene.
In the distance, great snow-capped towers loomed. The air was clear and pure, and there was silence such as I had never experienced. There was a series of distant pops, like a string of fireworks exploding, and the rest of the Rhuun appeared a few hundred metres away. Els whistled, then waved. Another tribe materialized, then another. Some sort of temporal meeting place, I guessed. Even at a distance, the towers looked derelict, and there should not have been snow in southern Spain. Els was unconcerned. There was game to hunt and nobody to defend it, so nothing else mattered. Taking my hand again, she began to lead me toward the other Rhuun.
In the years since our arrival I have concluded that humanity has ceased to exist, possibly wiped out by a genetically targeted plague, destroyed by a doomsday weapon . . . victims of their ingenuity. I have become a great shaman, inventing a primitive type of writing, the bow, the bone flute, the tallow lamp, and even cave painting, but when I die I shall end nature’s experiment with high intelligence—once known as humanity. Sheer intelligence has not proved to be a good survival trait in the long run, and through their fantastic mobility the Rhuun have inherited the Earth.
WATERSPIDER
Philip K. Dick
I
That morning, as he carefully shaved his head until it glistened, Aaron Tozzo pondered a vision too unfortunate to be endured. He saw in his mind fifteen convicts from Nachbaren Slager, each man only one inch high, in a ship the size of a child’s balloon. The ship, traveling at almost the speed of light, continued on forever, with the men aboard neither knowing nor caring what became of them.
The worst part of the vision was just that in all probability it was true.
He dried his head, rubbed oil into his skin, then touched the button within his throat. When contact with the Bureau switchboard had been established, Tozzo said, “I admit we can do nothing to get those fifteen men back, but at least we can refuse to send any more.”
His comment, recorded by the switchboard, was passed on to his co-workers. They all agreed; he listened to their voices chiming in as he put on his smock, slippers and overcoat. Obviously, the flight had been an error; even the public knew that now. But—
“But we’re going on,” Edwin Fermeti, Tozzo’s superior, said above the clamor. “We’ve already got the volunteers.”
“Also from Nachbaren Slager?” Tozzo asked. Naturally the prisoners there would volunteer; their lifespan at the camp was no more than five or six years. And if this flight to Proxima were successful, the men aboard would obtain their freedom. They would not have to return to any of the five inhabited planets within the Sol System.
“Why does it matter where they originate?” Fermeti said smoothly.
Tozzo said, “Our effort should be directed toward improving the U.S. Department of Penology, instead of trying to reach other stars.” He had a sudden urge to resign his position with the Emigration Bureau and go into politics as a reform candidate.
Later, as he sat at the breakfast table, his wife patted him sympathetically on the arm. “Aaron, you haven’t been able to solve it yet, have you?”
“No,” he admitted shortly. “And now I don’t even care.” He did not tell her about the other ship loads of convicts which had fruitlessly been expended; it was forbidden to discuss that with anyone not employed by a department of the Government.
“Could they be re-entering on their own?”
“No. Because mass was lost here, in the Sol System. To re-enter they have to obtain equal mass back, to replace it. That’s the whole point.” Exasperated, he sipped his tea and ignored her. Women, he thought. Attractive but not bright. “They need mass back,” he repeated. “Which would be fine if they were making a round trip, I suppose. But this is an attempt to colonize; it’s not a guided tour that returns to its point of origin.”
“How long does it take them to reach Proxima?” Leonore asked. “All reduced like that, to an inch high.”
“About four years.”
Her eyes grew large. “That’s marvelous.”
Grumbling at her, Tozzo pushed his chair back from the table and rose. I wish they’d take her, he said to himself, since she imagines it’s so marvelous. But Leonore would be too smart to volunteer.
Leonore said softly, “Then I was right. The Bureau has sent people. You as much as admitted it just now.”
Flushing, Tozzo said, “Don’t tell anybody; none of your female friends especially. Or it’s my job.” He glared at her.
On that hostile note, he set off for the Bureau.
As Tozzo unlocked his office door, Edwin Fermeti hailed him. “You think Donald Nils is somewhere on a planet circling Proxima at this very moment?” Nils was a notorious murderer who had volunteered for one of the Bureau’s flights. “I wonder—maybe he’s carrying around a lump of sugar five times his size.”
“Not really very funny,” Tozzo said.
Fermeti shrugged. “Just hoping to relieve the pessimism. I think we’re all getting discouraged.” He followed Tozzo into his office. “Maybe we should volunteer ourselves for the next flight.” It sounded almost as if he meant it, and Tozzo glanced quickly at him. “Joke,” Fermeti said.
“One more flight,” Tozzo said, “and if it fails, I resign.”
“I’ll tell you something,” Fermeti said. “We have a new tack.” Now Tozzo’s co-worker Craig Gilly had come sauntering up. To the two men, Fermeti said, “We’re going to try using pre-cogs in obtaining our formula for re-entry.” His eyes flickered as he saw their reaction.
Astonished, Gilly said, “But all the pre-cogs are dead. Destroyed by Presidential order twenty y
ears ago.”
Tozzo, impressed, said, “He’s going to dip back into the past to obtain a pre-cog. Isn’t that right, Fermeti?”
“We will, yes,” his superior said, nodding. “Back to the golden age of pre-cognition. The twentieth century.”
For a moment Tozzo was puzzled. And then he remembered. During the first half of the twentieth century so many pre-cogs—people with the ability to read the future—had come into existence that an organized guild had been formed with branches in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Pennsylvania. This group of pre-cogs, all knowing one another, had put out a number of periodicals which had flourished for several decades. Boldly and openly, the members of the pre-cog guild had proclaimed in their writings their knowledge of the future. And yet—as a whole, their society had paid little attention to them.
Tozzo said slowly, “Let me get this straight. You mean you’re going to make use of the Department of Archaeology’s time-dredges to scoop up a famous pre-cog of the past?”
Nodding, Fermeti said, “And bring him here to help us, yes.”
“But how can he help us? He would have no knowledge of our future, only of his own.”
Fermeti said, “The Library of Congress has already given us access to its virtually complete collection of pre-cog journals of the twentieth century.” He smiled crookedly at Tozzo and Gilly, obviously enjoying the situation. “It’s my hope—and my expectation—that among this great body of writings we will find an article specifically dealing with our re-entry problem. The chances, statistically speaking, are quite good . . . they wrote about innumerable topics of future civilization, as you know.”
After a pause, Gilly said, “Very clever. I think your idea may solve our problem. Speed-of-light travel to other star systems may yet become a possibility.”
Sourly, Tozzo said, “Hopefully, before we run out of convicts.” But he, too, liked his superior’s idea. And, in addition, he looked forward to seeing face to face one of the famous twentieth century pre-cogs. Theirs had been one brief, glorious period—sadly, long since ended.
