I assigned to the Mechandroid Belem a problem involving the opening of the Betelgeuse system. I had worked with Belem before. While Mechandroid knowledge and experience goes into a common pool Belem’s reactions would be a shade quicker since he had once opened a similar system before, so I asked for him. At that time I was on the Antares base. When I checked later on Belem he had vanished.
We went through the automatic routine. We studied the records and traced Belem’s movements up to the moment of his disappearance. We learned several interesting things. Obviously Belem had thought it necessary to disappear in order to solve his assigned problem. So we checked on the problem. The Andromeda system was involved and we discovered that there was something odd, hitherto undiscovered, about the Andromeda sector.
First of all there was a potential nova involved. Secondly, a new type of matter existed on one of the planets revolving about the star that was preparing to explode. It seemed to be a neutral matter, in absolute stasis. We quarantined the system immediately, pending farther investigation.
You never know into what queer bypaths a Mechandroid’s investigation will lead. The creatures see factors involved that no human mind would bother with. They’re never content with ten decimals but always work down to the absolute quantity. It didn’t surprise me a great deal to find recording-tapes in Belem’s laboratory which described and localized a terrestrial time-axis.
We went to the point charted. Belem had already worked out a system for displacing the special atomic structure involved and waking the subjects. What subjects? I learned that soon enough.
At the time-axis, which existed not far from the ancient bed of the St. Lawrence River, we found a shell of matter. R-type radiations showed us there were four living beings within that shell. They were in drugged hypnotic sleep. One of them was the Mechandroid Belem. The second was myself. The others were an unknown man and woman.
My Director discussed the situation with me.
“Belem has been located?” I asked.
“We thought so,” the Director said, “but you’re in the time-axis chamber too. You’re apparently in two places at once—so Belem may be as well. You know how dangerous a Mechandroid on an unorthodox problem can be. Don’t forget what happened to Titan twenty years ago. Well—obviously four people have, in the past, used drugs and hypnosis to free their minds from time-consciousness as their bodies were freed by the atomic displacement their device has set up around them.”
“And I’m with them, it seems.”
“You have no memory of it? But they came out of the past—all three of them.”
“Circular time? Spiral time?”
“I don’t know,” the Director said. “It’s theoretical so far. The empirical method obviously is to waken these four and find out what happened to them. How they came to be in this time-axis. Certainly a Mechandroid loose in time is too dangerous to be permitted. As for you—”
We had no answer to that, either of us. I was standing here, solid and real. But my double, my other self, was in the time-axis.
“Waken them,” the Director said.
That was obviously the next step. The only possible step.
“Very well,” I said. It was my job. A job must be completed at any cost. Men are expendable. Mankind is not.
THEN I was Jeremy Cortland again.
We were in the Swan Garden, Paynter and I, looking at each other across far distances. The shadows of a dozen other selves faded and wavered through my mind—and simultaneously I felt a strange sort of mental withdrawal. With the dying remnant of Paynter’s memory, I knew the reason. As I had been reading—living in—other minds, so he had been reading my own.
But he did not know that the Mechandroid Belem—DeKalb—was spying through my brain. I felt certain of that, as certain as though—DeKalb—Belem had told me in so many words. No, Paynter might have stripped my mind clean of its memories, but there was one memory the Mechandroid’s curious powers had kept from his grasp—the brief adventure I had had, via matter-transmitter, on another planet among Mechandroids.
Abruptly full realization came to me. I remembered the “autopsy” I had glimpsed—the Mechandroids clustered about a long table on which a body lay and above which a shining web quivered. Once, twenty years ago, a boy had seen a similar sight on Titan—the creation of a super-Mechandroid, the experiment utterly forbidden through all the Galaxy. A city had been blasted into dust to stop that danger. I remembered, strangely, with another man’s memory.
Now it was happening again. A second-stage man-machine was being constructed somewhere on some far planet—and Paynter did not know that, and I could not tell him. The post-hypnotic command was too strong for me. I could not betray the secret to Paynter even if I tried.
Which reminded me that Paynter now had my memories. His face was grayish as he watched me.
“That new type of matter we’ve just found in the Andromeda system,” he said. “I know what it is now. You called it the nekron.”
Then he must know as well that I was infected with the—the thing, that I was a carrier, a culture for that swift, slaying thing that no grip could hold.
But he did not mention it. Instead, in a troubled way, he began to talk about Belem.
“Belem was set the problem of opening the Betelgeuse system. Which is simple enough. But the Mechandroids are thorough. I suspect that Belem checked all the possible influential factors, and saw that nekronic matter exists in Andromeda on a planet of a sun ready to become a nova.
“When that happens the violent explosion will carry the nekronic atoms, on light-radiations, far into interstellar space—far enough to reach and infect Betelgeuse. For some reason I don’t know yet Belem decided the time-axis should be—” He paused, scowling. “Did he leave those notes purposely? Did he want us to open the time-axis chamber, Cortland?”
“How should I know?” I asked. “You’ve got all my memories now, haven’t you?”
“I think he did. But where is Belem now?” I knew that—but I couldn’t tell him.
“Why did Belem disappear? Why have a dozen other Mechandroids disappeared? Why didn’t they announce the problem publicly?”
He had forgotten he was still wearing the helmet. Now he lifted it slowly from his head and I followed his example.
“Because they had to work in secret,” he said tentatively. “Now what could they do in secret that they couldn’t do with all the science of the Galaxy to help them? There’s only one thing. The Mechandroids must solve the problems set them—
“They are making a second-stage Mechandroid,” Paynter said flatly. “That must be what’s happening. Scylla and Charybdis then. For a super-Mechandroid is as certain a menace as the nekron itself.”
“But why?” I asked, prompted by a conviction that the devil I knew—the nekronic infection—was far worse than any manlike machine, no matter how perfected.
“Because the Mechandroids would probably obey it instead of us,” Paynter told me. “The Mechandroids are vulnerable because they’re partially human. A second-stage type probably wouldn’t be. When you consider the knowledge and skills the Mechandroids already have—and if they’re applying them to the creation of a mutation of their own—why, such a monster could easily be invulnerable. Suppose it worked on absolute logic? That might call for the extinction of all life-forms! I don’t know. No one knows. How can anyone think like a mutation from the Mechandroid type?”
I shook my head. “Don’t ask me. I’ve got my own problems. Those four asleep in the time-axis. There must be an answer somewhere, Paynter. There must be!”
“There is.an answer.” He said it so soberly that I felt an instant’s chill in my own mind. I had good reason to feel a chill. Paynter went on in a very somber voice. “Now I’ll tell you the truth, Cortland,” he said.
CHAPTER XV
Crumbling Flesh
THE four silent figures lay deep in their age-old slumber in the chamber under the mountain. I saw them there again. I could
feel the weight of the helmet on my head and I was this time fully aware of the Swan Garden around me and the sound of Paynter’s breathing at my side. But I was seeing the projection of a three-dimensional film. I was looking into the chamber as a camera’s eye had looked.
“This is the official record we made when we opened the cave,” Paynter said invisibly at my elbow. “Now watch carefully what happens. No one knows this but you and myself and the few technicians who were on the spot. We’ve kept it quiet It’s so—so—well, watch and you’ll see.”
Nothing moved in the cave. Nothing had moved, I suppose, for a thousand years or more, not since all motion ceased when we sank into our long slumber. But now lights began to flash from beyond the gray egg of nothingness that walled us in. Paynter’s technicians were at work, trying to break that shell, trying to hatch out—what? Something terrifying. I knew that by the tone of Paynter’s voice.
The lights flashed and faded, glowed again, paled. Now the camera drew back and I could see Paynter himself, standing beside a group of workers and a battery of machines. All were intent upon the egg of time that held the sleepers.
It was curious to hear Paynter speak then—the Paynter of the cavern, speaking in the film, not the Paynter who sat beside me. Duplication piled upon duplication.
“What are the chances?” I heard him ask. “Are they going to wake?”
Murmurs answered him. After awhile, during which his eyes were very thoughtful upon the sleepers and upon the woman among the sleepers in particular, I heard him say in a musing voice, “We should have one of the entertainers here. If this is actually a time involvement, as you say, then these people will have been asleep a long while and they’ll feel bewildered when they wake.
“We need someone like—like—yes, Topaz—to speed their adjustment.” (I knew why he had thought of Topaz. I knew he had seen, without realizing it, the face of Topaz implicit in Dr. Essen’s sleeping face.)
“Send for Topaz,” he said firmly, his voice echoing in the cavern as ours had echoed once, a thousand years or many thousands of years before.
(Now perhaps this is as good a place as any for a word about the language he was speaking. It was certainly English but not as familiar a language as I write down. Any living tongue rapidly accumulates new words and phrases, drops old ones, assigns new meanings to words already in use, so that the colloquialisms of one generation are gibberish to the generation before it.
The English we were speaking was changed, not a living language. Matter-transmission had spread civilization over a vast area and some common tongue was a necessity, but it couldn’t be a tongue that changed or it would soon cease to be a common language. So it wasn’t easy to follow what these people said around me—but it wasn’t impossible either.)
The camera ground on for about thirty seconds more and then blurred briefly. Beside me Paynter spoke in a quick, impatient voice.
“Skip all that. It’s just more experiments. This was the period when they completed the analysis of the clothing and established the period from which it came as mid-Twentieth Century. It was about six hours after that before they breached the shell of force. I was notified and I sent for Topaz and came in myself for the finish. Now watch.”
The cavern took shape again before me. Gear in the bath of what was probably ultraviolet, because it brought the images out so dearly, the four sleepers lay. But this time there was a hum of activity around them. Men passed before the camera, obscuring it now and then, carrying lenses and long glowing tubes and angular things a little like sextants. I heard Topaz’s sweet high laughter and Paynter’s rebuke.
“Watch,” Paynter said beside me. “It happened very suddenly.”
AS HE spoke, I saw the change begin.
It was like a cleavage in space, a widening crack that spiderwebbed across the empty air like a riven bubble of plastic. The sleepers showed for an instant, distorted as though seen through a shattering substance with a different refractive index from air.
Then the cavern darkened for an instant. The four bodies seemed to spring into more dimensional reality—I sensed that their clarity was not due to the ultraviolet bath. It was as though a stereopticon image had become tangible. For a flashing second the four figures became part of—normal space. The shiell of energy Dr. Essen had created so long ago no longer prisoned them beyond space and time.
The place grew darker still. It gave me a feeling of inexplicable urgency. I was on the verge of remembering something—that red dish twilight with faint lights twinkling through it was—was—
My thought paused. For the bodies were—crumbling.
I had a second of horrible, sickening terror, as though I felt my own flesh falling into dust too. Instinctively my fingers tightened on my legs. It was bewildering to feel my own flesh firm beneath my hands while before me in the projection I could see the same flash crumble from my bones.
I watched myself disintegrate in the red twilight that had filled the cavern, fall swiftly into dust as if the thousand years of time we had cheated as we slept were taking its toll all in one final moment. But I knew that was not the answer. Living flesh does not crumble like that and we had been living until the egg broke around us. There was some more terrifying solution than that.
Suddenly, in my bewilderment and terror, I knew what the answer was. That shadowy red twilight, with lights faintly flashing across an empty world—I had seen that dusk before. In that same twilight I had seen the Face of Ea looking out over the world’s night. That crumbling of our flesh into dust had been no accident.
I knew I had watched the four of us murdered in our age-long sleep, deliberately dispersed into nothingness—by what? By whom? I had no way of guessing, but it seemed to me the red twilight that filled the cave indicated something of an answer. Nothing was happening to us at random, I knew fully in that moment of revelation. It was planned, deliberately planned—and by the people of tire Face?
They had summoned us across the millenniums. Had they planned our shipwreck here on the strand of some middle future and then, with calm intent, scattered our dissolving bones upon the cavern floor, having used and finished us?
No, for we were still alive.
Only I remembered my own identity clearly, but I was sure the icily violent ego of Murray lay buried somewhere beneath the surface of Paynter’s mind. I had looked into Letta Essen’s eyes in the lovely face of Topaz. DeKalb must linger somewhere, submerged but waiting, behind the metal eyes of Belem. So we were not dead.
The dust that had been ourselves ceased its crumbling and falling and settled into long, roughly man-shaped mounds on the floor of the cave.
“That happened coincidentally,” Paynter said with elaborate detachment. “Rot something rather odd took place at the same time. Look.”
The scene changed. The focus had shifted to another lens on the far side of the cavern. In the foreground Paynter stood, behind Topaz. Their feces were intent and horrified as they watched the egg begin to crack.
The film had stepped back sixty seconds and I was watching again the first beginnings of the disaster inside the shell of time. That carious riving of the air began again, the red twilight glimmering through, repeating itself as it would repeat endlessly whenever anyone chose to play this recording over.
But now, as the bodies began to crumble, I saw a change slip across Paynter’s face. I saw it go blank, then suddenly go quite bright with a blaze of awareness—and then totally blank.
His knees sagged. He folded up and dropped limply forward. Someone jumped to his side from the crowd at his back, caught him and eased him to the dusty floor. As he fell I could see beyond him the small, brightly colored body that was Topaz, collapsed without a sound.
There was milling confusion around the two for a moment. Then Paynter stirred and the crowd backed away a little. Paynter sat up. consciousness returning visibly to his blank face. Topaz, beside him, stirred and moved her hand, lifted it and, with her eyes still closed, brushed the clustering cur
ls from her face with a curiously innocent vanity.
At my elbow Paynter said, “All right, that was that. A moment’s faintness. Neither of us suffered anything worse. But let’s go back again to the moment the shell cracked and Topaz and I fainted. There was a crowd outside, waiting to see what would happen. You’d be surprised how easy it is to draw a crowd. They didn’t take long to assemble, via matter-transmission, once word got out. Some of our other cameras caught an interesting detail or two.”
NOW I saw a rolling slope thronged with men and women. Figures were toiling up from a plain below, where last I had seen the forests of northern Canada stretch unbroken. In the far distance a low white building gleamed in the sunlight among orchards.
“That building,” Paynter told me, “is the Kerry Plum Orchard transmitter. All these people came through it. They came from all over the galaxy, of course. No way to trace where they started from. Which is a pity because—well, look.”
I looked—and saw my own face.
Duplication doubled and redoubled. My head swam as I tried to realize it, to count up how many Jerry Cortlands were in existence in this one space and time. One had fallen to dust in the cave. One sat here in the Swan Garden beside Paynter. One strolled up the hillside toward the cavern, casually, through the crowd. It was myself, all right. I wore rather ragged shorts and a tattered pullover.
I turned left around a rock with part of the crowd and then there was a sudden humming excitement all over the hillside and a flash of reddish light from the cave.
“We’ve gone back again to the moment when the bodies began to disintegrate,” Paynter reminded me. “Down in the cave Topaz and I are collapsing. Up here—watch yourself.”
I saw the same look of dazed wonder melt into blankness on my pictured face. I saw myself fall.
“When you woke again.” Paynter was saying, “you were in the transmitter room by the City. Topaz was with you. That was when your memories started. Remember?”
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