Two in Time

by Wilson Tucker

  Katrina said: "Everyone here expected the Chinese to intervene, to invade, and we knew we could not stop them. Brian, our country had lost or abandoned twenty million men overseas; we were helpless before any invader. But they did not come. I thank God they did not come. They were prevented from coming when the Soviet turned on them in a holy war in the name of Communism: that long, long border dispute burst into open warfare and the Russians drove on Lop Nor." She made a little gesture of futility. "We never learned what happened; we never learned the outcome of anything in Europe. Perhaps they are still fighting, if anyone is left alive to fight. Our contact with the Continent was lost, and has never been restored to our knowledge. _We_ lost contact with that military group in Virginia when the electricity failed. We were alone."

  He said in wonder: "Israel, Egypt, Australia, Britain, Russia, China--all of them: the world."

  "All of them," she repeated with a dull fatigue. "And our troops were wasted in nearly every one of them, thrown away by a man with a monumental ego. Not more than a handful of those troops ever returned. We were done."

  Chaney said: "I guess the Commander came up at the end--seventeen months later."

  "Arthur emerged from the TDV on his target date, just past the end of it: the beginning of the second winter after the rebellion. We think the rebellion _had_ ended, spent and exhausted on its own fury. We think the men who assaulted him at the gatehouse were stragglers, survivors who had managed through the first winter. He said those men were as surprised by his appearance, as he was by theirs; they might have fled if he had not cornered them." Katrina laced her fingers on the tabletop in familiar gesture and looked at him. "We saw a few armed bands roaming the countryside that second winter. We repaired the fence, stood guard, but were not again molested: Arthur put out warnings he had found in the book you gave him. By the following spring, the bands of men had dwindled to a few scavengers prowling the fields for game--but after that we saw no one. Until you came, we saw no one."

  He said: "So ends the bloody business of the day."

  EIGHTEEN

  Katrina peered across the table and sought to break the unhappy silence between them.

  "A family, you said? Father, mother, and child? A healthy child? How old was he?"

  "I don't know: three, maybe four. The kid was having himself a fine time--playing, hollering, picking up things--until I scared off his parents." Chaney still felt bitter about that encounter. "They all looked healthy enough. They _ran_ healthy."

  Katrina nodded her satisfaction. "It gives one hope for the future, doesn't it?"

  "I suppose so."

  She reprimanded him: "You _know_ so. If those people were healthy, they were eating well and living in some degree of safety. If the man carried no weapon, he thought none was needed. If they had a child and were together, family life has been re-established. And if that child survived his birth and was thriving, it suggests a quiet normalcy has returned to the world, a measure of sanity. All that gives me hope for the futare."

  "A quiet normalcy," he repeated. "The sun in that sky was quiet. It was cold out there."

  The dark eyes peered at him. "Have you ever admitted to yourself that you could be wrong, Brian? Have you even thought of your translations today? You were a stubborn man; you came close to mocking Major Moresby."

  Chaney failed to answer: it was not easy to reassess the _Eschatos_ scroll in a day. A piece of his mind insisted that ancient Hebrew fiction was only fiction.

  They sat in the heavy silence of the briefing room, looking at each other in the lantern light and knowing this was coming to an end. Chaney was uneasy. There had been a hundred--a thousand--questions he'd wanted to ask when he first walked into the room, when he first discovered her, but now he could think of little to say. Here was Katrina, the once youthful, radiant Katrina of the swimming pool--and outside was Katrina's family waiting for him to leave.

  He wanted desperately to ask one more question but at the same time he was afraid to ask: what happened to _him_ after his return, after the completion of the probe? What had happened to _him?_ He wanted to know where he had gone, what he had done, how he had survived the perilous years--he wanted to know if he had survived those years. Chaney was long convinced that he was not on station in 1980, not there at the time of the field trials, but where was he then? She might have some knowledge of him after he'd finished the mission and left; she might have kept .in touch. He was afraid to ask. Pindar's advice stopped his tongue.

  He got up suddenly from his chair. "Katrina, will you walk downstairs with me?"

  She gave him a strange look, an almost frightened look, but said: "Yes, sir."

  Katrina left her chair and came around the table to him. Age had slowed her graceful walk and he was acutely distressed to see her move with difficulty. Chaney picked up a lantern, and offered her his free arm. He felt a flush of excitement as she neared him, touched him.

  They descended the stairs without speaking. Chaney slowed his pace to accommodate her and they went down slowly, one cautious step at a time. Kathryn van Hise held on to the rail and moved with the hesitant pace of the aged.

  They stopped at the opened door to the operations room. Chaney held the lantern high to inspect the vehicle: the hatch was open and the hull of the craft covered by dust; the concrete cradle seemed dirty with age.

  He asked suddenly: "How much did I report, Katrina? Did I tell them about you? Your family? Did I tell them about that family on the railroad tracks? What did I say?"

  "Nothing." She wouldn't look up at him.

  "What?"

  "You reported nothing."

  He thought her voice was strained. "I had to say something. Gilbert Seabrooke will demand _something_."

  "Brian--" She stopped, swallowed hard, and then began again. "You reported nothing, Mr. Chaney. You did not return from your probe. We knew you were lost to us when the vehicle failed to return at sixty-one seconds: you were wholly lost to us."

  Brian Chaney very carefully put the lantern down and then turned her around and pulled her head up. He wanted to see her face, wanted to see why she was lying. Her eyes were wet with threatened tears but there was no lie there.

  Stiffly: "Why not, Katrina?"

  "We have no power, Mr. Chaney. The vehicle is helpless, immobile."

  Chaney swung his head to stare at the TDV and as quickly swung back to the woman. He wasn't aware that he was holding her in a painful grip.

  "The engineers can pull me back."

  "No. They can do nothing for you: they lost you when that device stopped tracking, when the computer went silent, when the power failed here and you overshot the failure date. They lost you; they lost the vehicle." She pulled away from his hard grasp, and her wavering gaze fell. "You didn't come back to the laboratory, Mr. Chaney. No one saw you again after the launch; no one saw you again until you appeared here, today."

  Almost shouting: "Stop calling me Mr. Chaney!"

  "I am . . . I am terribly sorry. You were as lost to us as Major Moresby. We thought . . ."

  He turned his back on the woman and deliberately walked into the operations room. Brian Chaney climbed up on the polywater tank and thrust a leg through the open hatch of the TDV. He didn't bother to undress or remove the heavy boots. Wriggling downward through the hatch, he slammed it 'shut over his head and looked for the blinking green light. There was none. Chaney stretched out full length on the web sling and thrust his heels against the kickbar at the bottom. No red light answered him.

  He knew panic.

  He fought against that and waited for his nerves to rest, waited for a stolid placidity to return. The memory of his first test came back: he'd thought then the vehicle was like a cramped tomb, and he thought so now. Lying on the webbed sling for the first time--and waiting for something spectacular to happen--he had felt an ache in his legs and had stretched them out to relieve the ache. His feet had struck the kickbar, sending him back to the beginning before the engineers were ready; they had been
angry with him. And an hour later, in the lecture room, everyone heard and saw the results of his act: the vehicle kicked backward as he thrust out his feet, the sound struck his eardrums and the lights dimmed. The astonished engineers left the room on the run, and Gilbert Seabrooke proposed a new study program to be submitted to Indic. The TDV sucked power from its present, not its past.

  Chaney reached up to snug the hatch. It was snug. The light that should have been blinking green stayed dark. Chaney jut the heavy boots against the bar and pushed. The red light stayed dark. He pushed again, then kicked at the bar. After a moment he twisted around to peer through the plastic bubble into the room. It was dimly lit by the lantern resting on the floor.

  He shouted: "Goddammit, go!" And kicked again.

  The room was dimly lit by lantern light.

  He walked slowly along the corridor in the feeble light of the lantern, walked woodenly in shock tinged with fear. The failure of the vehicle to move under his prodding had stunned him. He wished desperately for Katrina, wished she was standing by with a word or a gesture he might seize for a crutch, but she wasn't visible in the corridor. She had left him while he struggled with the vehicle, perhaps to return to the briefing room, perhaps to go outside, perhaps to retire to whatever sort of shelter she shared with her son and daughter. He was alone, fighting panic. The door to the engineering laboratory was standing open, as was the door to the storeroom, but she wasn't waiting for him in either place. Chaney listened for her but heard nothing, and went on after the smallest pause. The dusty corridor ended and a flight of stairs led upward to the operations exit.

  He thought the sign on the door was a bitter mockery--one of the many visited on him since he'd sailed for Israel a century or two ago. He regretted the day he had read and translated those scrolls--but at the same time he wished desperately he knew the identity of that scribe who had amused himself and his fellows by creating the _Eschatos_ document. A single name would be enough: an Amos or a Malachi or an Ibycus.

  He would hoist a glass of water from the Nabataean cistern and salute the unknown genius for his wit and wisdom, for his mockery. He would shout to the freshly scrubbed sky: "Here, damn your eyes, Ibycus! Here, for the lohg-dead dragons and the ruptured fence and the ice on the rivers. Here, for my head of gold, my breast of silver, my legs of iron and my feet of clay. My feet of clay, Ibycus!" And he would hurl the glass at the lifeless TDV.

  Chaney turned the keys in the locks and pushed out into the chill night air. The darkness surprised him; he hadn't realized he'd spent so many bittersweet hours inside with Katrina. The parking lot was empty but for the cart and his discarded rifle. Katrina's children hadn't waited for him, and he was aware of a small hurt.

  He stepped away from the building and then turned back to look at it: a massive white concrete temple in the moonlight. The barbaric legions had failed to bring it down, despite the damage caused elsewhere on the station.

  The sky was the second surprise: he had seen it by day and marveled, but at night it was shockingly beautiful. The stars _were_ bright and hard as carefully polished gems, and there were a hundred or a thousand more than he'd ever seen before; he had never known a sky like that in his lifetime. The entire eastern rim of the heavens was lighted by a rising moon of remarkable brilliance.

  Chaney stood alone in the center of the parking lot searching the face of the moon, searching out the Sea of Vapors and the pit known as Bode's Crater. The pulsating laser there caught his eye and held it. That one thing had not changed--that one monument not destroyed. The brilliant mote still flashed on the rim of Bode's Crater, marking the place where two astronauts had fallen in the Seventies, marking their grave and their memorial. One of them had been black. Brian Chaney thought himself lucky: he had air to breathe but those men had none.

  He said aloud: "You weren't so damned clever, Ibycus! You missed _that_ one--your prophets didn't show you the _new_ sign in the sky."

  Chaney sat down in the tilted cart and stretched out his legs for balance. The rifle was an unpleasant lump under his spine and he threw it aside to be rid of it. In a little while he leaned backward and rested against the bed of the cart. The whole of the southeast sky was before him. Chaney thought he should go looking for Katrina, for Arthur and Kathryn, and a place to sleep. Perhaps he would do that after a while, but not now, not now.

  The stray thought came that the engineers had been right about one thing: the polywater tank hadn't leaked.

  Elwood Station was at peace.

  THERE WILL BE TIME

  by Poul Anderson

  BE AT EASE. I’m not about to pretend this story is true. First, that claim is a literary convention which went out with Theo­dore Roosevelt of happy memory. Second, you wouldn’t be­lieve it. Third, any tale signed with my name must stand or fall as entertainment; I am a writer, not a cultist. Fourth, it is my own composition. Where doubts or gaps occur in that mass of notes, clippings, photographs, and recollections of words spoken which was bequeathed me, I have supplied conjectures. Names, places, and incidents have been changed as seemed needful. Throughout, my narrative uses the techniques of fiction.

  Finally, I don’t believe a line of it myself. Oh, we could get together, you and I, and ransack official files, old newspapers, yearbooks, journals, and so on forever. But the effort and ex­pense would be large; the results, even if positive, would prove little; we have more urgent jobs at hand; our discoveries could conceivably endanger us.

  These pages are merely for the purpose of saying a little about Dr. Robert Anderson. I do owe the book to him. Many of the sentences are his, and my aim throughout has been to capture something of his style and spirit, in memoriam.

  You see, I already owed him much more. In what follows, you may recognize certain things from earlier stories of mine. He gave me those ideas, those backgrounds and people, in hour after hour while we sat with sherry and Mozart before a drift­wood fire, which is the best kind. I greatly modified them, in part for literary purposes, in part to make the tales my own work. But the core remained his. He would accept no share of payment. “If you sell it,” he laughed, “take Karen out to an extravagant dinner in San Francisco, and empty a pony of akvavit for me.”

  Of course, we talked about everything else too. My memo­ries are rich with our conversations. He had a pawky sense of humor. The chances are overwhelming that, in leaving me a boxful of material in the form he did, he was turning his pri­vate fantasies into a final, gentle joke.

  On the other hand, parts of it are uncharacteristically bleak.

  Or are they? A few times, when I chanced to be present with one or two of his smaller grandchildren, I’d notice his pleasure in their company interrupted by moments of what looked like pain. And when last I saw him, our talk turned on the probable shape of the future, and suddenly he exclaimed, “Oh, God, the young, the poor young! Poul, my generation and yours have had it outrageously easy. All we ever had to do was be white Americans in reasonable health, and we got our place in the sun. But now history’s returning to its normal climate here also, and the norm is an ice age.” He tossed off his glass and poured a refill more quickly than was his wont. “The tough and lucky will survive,” he said. “The rest . . . will have had what happiness was granted them. A medical man ought to be used to that kind of truth, right?” And he changed the subject.

  In his latter years Robert Anderson was tall and spare, a bit stoop-shouldered but in excellent shape, which he attributed to hiking and bicycling. His face was likewise lean, eyes blue be­hind heavy glasses, clothes and white hair equally rumpled. His speech was slow, punctuated by gestures of a pipe if he was en­joying his twice-a-day smoke. His manner was relaxed and ami­able. Nevertheless, he was as independent as his cat. “At my stage of life,” he observed, “what was earlier called oddness or orneriness counts as lovable eccentricity. I take full advantage of the fact.” He grinned. “Come your turn, remember what I’ve said.”

  On the surface, his life had been calm. He was
born in Phila­delphia in 1895, a distant relative of my father. Though our family is of Scandinavian origin, a branch has been in the States since the Civil War. But he and I never heard of each other till one of his sons, who happened to be interested in genealogy, happened to settle down near me and got in touch. When the old man came visiting, my wife and I were invited over and at once hit it off with him.

  His own father was a journalist, who in 1910 got the edi­torship of the newspaper in a small upper-Midwestern town (current population 10,000; less then) which I choose to call Senlac. He later described the household as nominally Episco­palian and principally Democratic. He had just finished his pre­medical studies when America entered the First World War and he found himself in the Army; but he never got overseas. Discharged, he went on to his doctorate and internship. My impression is that meanwhile he exploded a bit, in those hip-flask days. It cannot have been too violent. Eventually he returned to Senlac, hung out his shingle, and married his long­time fiancée.

  I think he was always restless. However, the work of gen­eral practitioners was far from dull-before progress con­demned them to do little more than man referral desks-and his marriage was happy. Of four children, three boys lived to adulthood and are still flourishing.

  In 1955 he retired to travel with his wife. I met him soon afterward. She died in 1958 and he sold their house but bought a cottage nearby. Now his journeys were less extensive; he re­marked quietly that without Kate they were less fun. Yet he kept a lively interest in life.

  He told me of those folk whom I, not he, have called the Maurai, as if it were a fable which he had invented but lacked the skill to make into a story. Some ten years later he seemed worried about me, for no reason I could see, and I in my turn worried about what time might be doing to him. But presently he came out of this. Though now and then an underlying grim­ness showed through, he was mostly himself again. There is no doubt that he knew what he was doing, for good or ill, when he wrote the clause into his will concerning me.