The Coils of Time

by A Bertram Chandler

  “It was similar to the samples brought back in your earlier experiments. Most of the same micro-organisms were present. As far as I can judge, there was nothing dangerous.”

  “And these microscopic life forms,” asked Wilkinson, “are typical of the life forms of a world with an atmosphere rich in oxygen?”

  “Yes,” admitted Titov.

  “Good. I want to go back. After your … prying, all of you know why. But next time, Dr. Henshaw, I don’t want to be cooped up in a steel casket, unable to move so much as a finger. I shall want freedom of movement, and ample time in which to execute my search.” A thought struck him. “Yes — this business of Time. Are you sure that I was away for only ten minutes? It seemed much longer to me.”

  “It may have been,” admitted the physicist. “It has already occured to me that the time scales of this Universe and … the other place? … do not match.”

  “I think, Dr. Henshaw,” said the stranger, “that it would be advisable to send a trained observer, a scientist, next time. It is obvious that vast new vistas are opening to us — possibly in my own field — and it seems a pity that our agent should be a man fanatically obsessed by his own private problems.”

  “You should know, Dr. Grimm,” Henshaw told him, “that this is a very common condition. In any case, Mr. Wilkinson volunteered when the rest of you were still laughing at me. All right, so he has his reasons, perfectly valid ones, for volunteering. So what? As far as I’m concerned, my apparatus is at the disposal of Mr. Wilkinson until such time as he is successful. That’s all.”

  “But Dr. Henshaw …”

  “I agree with Henshaw,” said Titov.

  “And I,” declared Olga.

  “It’s your Rube Goldberg machine, I suppose,” grumbled Grimm. “But I’m telling you, as a physician, that before Mr. Wilkinson undertakes any more wild goose chases he needs quiet and rest.”

  “He’ll not be able to rest now,” Olga said quietly, “until he’s found what he’s looking for.”

  “Thank you,” said Wilkinson.

  VII

  WILKINSON FRETTED at the delay occasioned by thorough preparation, but, as a senior ship’s officer, he was obliged to admit that it was inevitable. Nothing would be gained — indeed, all might well be lost — if he returned to the weird world beyond Henshaw’s dimension twisting apparatus unprepared.

  There was so much that he had to take with him, even though most of it might well be unnecessary. There were weapons, and a supply of starch and protein concentrate and water purifying tablets, and a first aid kit, and writing materials. The list seemed almost endless, and even though the weight of everything was cut down to a minimum, the spaceman wondered if he would be able to stagger along under the load of his rucksack.

  Titov did suggest that a scooter be sent back with him, but Wilkinson decided that the nature of the terrain, as he had seen it, militated against the use of any wheeled vehicle. Unfortunately it was impossible to transmit anything as large as a hover-car.

  While his equipment was being assembled and while Henshaw was working on his machine, making further adjustments, he talked matters over with Titov.

  “Of course,” the biologist told him, “there isn’t any real delay.”

  “Like hell there isn’t,” swore Wilkinson.

  “No, there’s not.” Then, just to annoy the spaceman, “Of course, you have to remember that once you start tinkering with Time, all delays can be cancelled. The trouble is that the controls on Henshaw’s gadget aren’t fine enough. You might well return to the Other World to find that your girl is still only a babe in arms….”

  “Surely Henshaw can do better than that.”

  “He might — if he had some concrete data to work with. But I’m afraid Wilkinson, that this second expedition of yours will be as much of a leap in the dark as the first one was.”

  “Then I’ll leap again, and again, and again — until I strike the right Time.”

  Titov smiled sympathetically and apologetically. “I believe you would, Wilkinson. Yes — I believe you would. But I sincerely hope for your sake, and for hers, that it will not be necessary. After all, it would be very unsettling for her if her future husband kept on appearing and vanishing at all sorts of odd times during her early life until he was satisfied that he’d got the date right.”

  He puckered his lips and whistled softly. Wilkinson could not help grinning as he recognized the tune; it was from one of the old Twentieth Century comic operas, Get Me To The Church On Time.

  “But all these speculations,” went on Titov, “are no more than wild guesses. Not even Henshaw knows just when — or where — he is sending his guinea pigs. We might employ our time more profitably discussing the equipment you are taking. You’ve decided against a scooter. Why not wait until the mechanics have one of the powered suits ready for you?”

  “Last time,” said Wilkinson, “I had a basinful of those tailor-made tin coffins.”

  “The one you were in saved your life. And it had no power unit, so you had no real experience of operating in it.”

  “I know. But the main snag is that it’s quite impossible for one to be opened from the inside. I shall spend quite a long time in the Other World, and I can’t be sure that I shall be able to find anybody to let me out of the armor as and when necessary.”

  “A powered suit could be modified.”

  “It would take too long.”

  “H’m. You’re very impatient, but I’d be the same in your shoes. And one of the standard Venus suits will give you protection enough. What about weapons?”

  “A Colt point two five automatic, with high velocity ammunition. Explosive bullets, of course.”

  “Why not a laser gun?”

  “It would be better, if I could be sure of finding a power supply for recharging the cell.”

  “You’re as likely to find that as you are to find a gunsmith’s shop where you can buy ammunition.”

  “Agreed. But I’m taking a couple of hundred rounds with me, and a laser gun is good for only twenty shots before recharging.”

  “I see your point. And while we’re on the subject of weapons, I think you’d better take a good knife.”

  “I’ve already thought of that. A knife is more than a weapon. It’s a very useful tool.”

  “You seem to have thought of most things,” admitted Titov. “But I wonder if you’ve thought of the most important thing of all?”

  “What’s that?”

  “From what you’ve already told us, that Other World may have a different Time Scale from this one. All right, you’re taking a watch with you, calendar watch, but how will you know that it’s still keeping this time? If you’re going to go traipsing all over the surface of that fantastic planet searching for your girl, how can you be sure of being back at the right place when Henshaw throws his machine into reverse, or whatever he does?”

  “Dr. Henshaw is a clever man,” said Wilkinson. “He has already thought of that complication.” He fumbled in the side pocket of his uniform jacket, bringing out two bracelets of metal mesh. At the first glance they looked like watch straps. Wilkinson slipped one onto his right wrist. “See?” he said. “A Moebius Strip. Don’t ask me how or why it works, but Henshaw assures me that it does, or will, work. As long as I’m wearing the thing, I shall be pulled back to the Here and Now as soon as my time’s up.”

  “And the other bracelet?”

  “For Vanessa, of course. It would be rather pointless if I came back without her. I’d sooner stay there, wherever it is, than leave her and lose her again.”

  “You could do worse,” admitted Titov. “Frankly, I hope most sincerely that the Director considers my application to be next on the list for teleportation. I’ve been going over your story in my mind, and that world just could be Earth in the Carboniferous Era. The rats and the rocket plane can be explained away. Somebody in our future — possibly working from the records of Henshaw’s experiments — is Time Traveling.”

&
nbsp; “But if they, whoever they are, are from our future, why should they have reverted to a primitive type of aircraft, or spacecraft?”

  “Perhaps the near-as-dammit Final War is going to happen after all, and they are representatives of a new technological culture.”

  “But the rats?”

  “Quite simple. They used rats in their first experiment, and a pair escaped.”

  “You almost convince me …” said Wilkinson slowly. “You almost convince me. But your ingenious theory doesn’t account for Vanessa.”

  “There are doubles …” said the biologist doubtfully.

  “Yes. There are doubles. But I’d say that the odds against a double with an identical thumbprint, and with an almost identical scar running across the thumbprint, are astronomical.”

  “Neither you nor Henshaw is a criminologist.”

  “No — but there is a criminologist on Venus. Dr. Naismith, from New Scotland Yard.”

  “Yes. I know. They chased him out here to carry out his experiments with the new hallucinogenic drugs. But his specialty is forensic medicine.”

  “And fingerprints are his hobby. He has examined both Henshaw’s book and Vanessa’s photograph, and he has assured me that the prints are identical.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser …” muttered Titov.

  “And hopefuller and hopefuller,” said Wilkinson firmly. He went on, his voice low, “You know, Titov, I’ve been cursing all this delay. But it would be a shame, now, to spoil everything by lack of preparation.”

  Then, raising his voice, “But I’m ready.”

  VIII

  YES, THOUGHT Wilkinson, I’m ready.

  He was standing at the center of the circle painted on the floor of the laboratory, facing the assemblage of gleaming rotors and spindles, motionless now, but awaiting only the pressure of Henshaw’s finger on the starting button. He was wearing a standard Venus-suit, a new one from the stores, thoroughly checked and tested. Beneath the light armor he had on shirt and slacks of cool yet tough olive-drab plastiweave, and the cuffs of his trousers were tucked into heavy boots. He was conscious of the weight of the tightly packed rucksack on his back, and conscious, too, of the slight drag on his hips of the belt that he was wearing outside the suit and from which hung the holstered pistol, the sheathed knife.

  He heard the voice of Henshaw, faint yet clear through the helmet diaphragm, “Stand by!”

  “Standing by,” he replied.

  He turned his head so that he could see the little physicist and Titov and Olga, who were standing beside him. He smiled at them, at the people who, in this short time, had become his friends, and ignored the others, the strangers in the laboratory. Titov grinned back at him cheerfully, the girl raised her hand in a gesture of farewell.

  “Now!” snapped Henshaw.

  The apparatus stirred and murmured, the gleaming wheels began to revolve, picking up speed. Wilkinson felt an uncomfortable prickling of his left wrist, and tried with his gloved right hand to scratch it through the tough fabric of his suit sleeve. He desisted when he realized what was causing it. He knew that it must be the metal bracelet, the little Moebius strip fabricated from the same alloys as the big one that, rotating on its shaft, had turned to focus upon him whatever force it was that Henshaw had tapped, whatever weird radiations were being generated, that was concentrating the temporal precession field of the spinning, gleaming, ever-tumbling gyroscopes.

  Wilkinson heard the thin, high, almost supersonic whine, but did not turn his head to look at the source of the disturbing sound. Instead, he fixed his regard on the faces of his friends, the faces that, he feared suddenly, he might never see again, the faces that flickered and faded, flickered and vanished, that were whirled away from him into some unfathomable limbo of lost years….

  But it was he who was being whirled away, falling free down the dark dimensions, no more than flotsam on the tide of time, a lost soul driven — where? when? — by the winds of it. He shut tight his eyes against the aching nothingness — and slowly opened them when he felt rough solidity under his doubly booted feet.

  She was walking slowly, hesitantly, down the path to the dry river bed.

  Save for the rough sandals on her feet she was naked, and her skin glowed warmly golden in the light from the yellow sky. She was not a child any longer. She was a woman, a beautiful woman.

  And she was Vanessa.

  He stared at her, not daring to believe that his search was ended, that his wild dreams were at last coming true. He stared at her, ignoring the crustaceans that crawled about his feet, the huge dragonfly that drifted slowly across his field of vision, the gaudy vegetation that was a somehow fitting background to the golden girl. (Later remembering the scene, he was to say that it reminded him of a painting by the long-dead Rousseau — but at the time the great French primitive had no place in his thoughts.)

  He stared at her as she approached him, slowly, hesitantly, picking her way among the stones. He stared at her, and marveled at the grace and the beauty of her. His head ached with the familiarity of her, the well remembered puckering of the eyebrows that in the other Vanessa — no, in Vanessa! — had always been indicative of puzzlement.

  She opened her mouth to speak, and he felt the first stirrings of fear, of doubt. Would her voice be the same? Could her voice be the same?

  She said — and, in spite of the faint, unidentifiable accent, it was Vanessa’s voice — “Who are you? Why do you always come to this place?”

  “Vanessa …” he said chokingly.

  “Yes, that is my name.” Her expression of puzzlement was more pronounced, and there was another expression, a mingling of hope and fear. “But who are you?”

  He tried to answer, but could not. So he put up his hands to the concealment helmet, twisted and lifted it.

  “No!” she cried. “No! It can’t be!”

  And then suddenly she was in his arms, sobbing, “Oh, Christopher, Christopher …” and he was holding her tightly, and trying to kiss away her tears. For long seconds neither of them was able to do more than to murmur inarticulately. Abruptly she pulled away from him, seemed to be listening for something. She caught his hand in hers, saying, “Hurry!”

  There was no mistaking the note of urgency in her voice, and he followed her, stumbling over the stones that she avoided with practiced ease. Up the steep bank she climbed gracefully while Wilkinson, perspiring heavily in his suit, scrambled clumsily after her. When she was standing on the thick, mosslike growth at the top of the low cliff she halted. She extended one shapely arm and pointed.

  Wilkinson could hear the low, ominous rumbling now, and he could see, far down the ravine, the onrushing gray wave that was the forerunner of the mud torrent He looked away from it to the rocky bottom where he had been standing, saw that all the rats had vanished and that the last of the little crustacea were scuttling for safety. He heard the girl say, “It would have been dreadful to have lost you again….” He looked at her as a shadow of doubt flickered across her face. She asked, almost inaudibly, “But you are Christopher?” She repeated pleadingly, “You are Christopher, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She sat down on a moss-covered boulder, and looked up at him, ignoring the drab, steaming torrent that was, by this time, surging along the watercourse. She said, “I’ve always known that there was something about this place…. Something … strange. Strange — but not hostile. Do you remember when the lifeboat crashed and you pulled me out of the wreckage? Do you remember that metal giant standing there? I had the oddest feeling that he wanted to help us, badly, but somehow couldn’t…. And there have been all the other apparitions. The white rats, and the ginger cat, and that book that was snatched away from me before I had a chance to look at it … And now you.” She caught his arm and pulled him down beside her. “But what did they do to you, Chris? I heard that you were dead, that they had killed you. But you must have escaped. How did you get back here?”

  Wilkinson remembe
red the shockingly familiar face of the young man who had pulled the girl from the wrecked plane. He knew now why that face had been so familiar. But it made sense. If Vanessa existed in this weird Universe, then so did he, Christopher Wilkinson. With a slight shudder he made the mental correction. He had existed. He wondered how best to initiate his enquiries — and, looking at the beautiful girl beside him, wondered briefly if he should do so.

  She went on, breathlessly, “This suit of yours … Did you escape in a spaceship? But I thought that they controlled every ship in the System. They own and control everything — but us….” She was silent for a little, her face registering doubt and anxiety. “Tell me, Chris,” she demanded sharply, “they don’t own you, do they? Have they sent you back to spy, or to lead them to our headquarters? Tell me, Chris!” Her voice was hard, urgent. “Tell me!”

  He said slowly and carefully. “No. They don’t own me.”

  She told him simply, “I believe you. I know you too well not to know when you’re lying. But you have to convince Hardcastle and Moira Simmons.” She shuddered. “Hardcastle’s as bad as they are, and so is Moira. You didn’t see what they did to Dorothy Wallis. That was after you were captured. It was Dorothy who was the traitor, who was responsible for the ambush. Hardcastle and Moira should have killed her cleanly, but first they made her talk, and then they …”

  “Vanessa,” he said painfully, breaking the tense silence. “Vanessa …”

  “Yes, Christopher?”

  “Vanessa, I am not what I seem …”

  She jumped to her feet. “Then get back to them!” she flared. “You deserve to die — but I couldn’t bear to see you die the way that Dorothy Wallis did.”

  “But I’m not working for them. I don’t even know who they are.”

  She said bitterly, “We know about their brainwashing. You’d better go, Christopher, before something triggers whatever post-hypnotic command has been planted in your mind.”

  “Damn it all!” he swore, “I don’t know anything about this cock-eyed world. I don’t belong here.”