The season was late spring or early summer, Ivo decided. June, perhaps. Late enough for the first pickerel-weed, too early yet for goldenrod.
He left the couple to their silent dialogue and traveled deeper into the swamp. Yes, there was an alligator in pursuit of fish, as graceful a swimmer as any. Emerging near the city, he passed cottontail rabbits and flickers browsing for beetles in the fields. It was amazing how much closer nature came to civilization, here.
He traversed the city, and found a creosoting plant, a box factory, a conventional cannery, shipping wharves, and at last a newspaper with the date: June 5, 1930.
They had jumped fifty light-years from Earth.
And those lovers — in their early seventies, now. It was a wonderful and somewhat painful thought.
Another jump, another fix: the scene differed: The terrain was still marshy, but no trace of either the stately live-oak or huge white-oak remained. Instead it was bright dawn upon white cedars, the average tree perhaps eighty feet tall, crowded together and cutting off much of the light of the sun so that it did not touch the ground directly.
Ivo paused to consider the implications. Cedar preferred freshwater swamps, and the marshes of Glynn were salt. How had this come about?
Either his fix was off or there had been a serious change in the landscape. The computer was responsible for the fix, establishing it by the gravitic and magnetic qualities of the planet: a complex and indirect process, but thorough. The location checked out. Therefore—
How big a jump had they taken?
“Continental drift?” Afra inquired, her voice seeming to emerge from the cedar grove. It was not hard to picture her standing there, just behind a tree.
“Drift?” Back to the stupids again.
“The movement of the continents in the course of geologic time,” she explained. “If the expression on your face means what it surely means, your landscape has changed. You might be a mile or so from where you thought you were, and it wouldn’t be the scope’s fault. The continent itself could have shifted. Or orogeny could have—”
“Could be. I seem to be in a freshwater swamp, inland from where I was, and the fix checks. But how much time — ?”
“Oh, a few million years or so.”
He drew off the goggles and stared at her. She was smiling, as he had suspected. “Such a jump is possible, you know,” he said, nettled.
“Certainly. But not this time. Our stellar configuration establishes our continued residence within the Milky-Way galaxy, so we have to be within seventy thousand light-years or so of Earth. I would judge within ten thousand, actually. And it is also possible for rivers to change course and for beaches to submerge. A few thousand years would be enough to change your flora and fauna perceptibly.”
Ivo replaced the goggles with something less than good grace and sped toward Brunswick. His exploration, he knew now, was confirmatory only; Afra had already worked out the position by astronomical means. The very process of locating Earth established its distance, though only his own investigation could pin it down precisely. The macroscope had a sweep-adjustment that enabled it to select for a certain type of image; that was one of a number of refinements courtesy of galactic broadcasts. Otherwise the problem of locating Earth would be horrendously complicated.
There was nothing at the Brunswick location except scrub forest. “It’s pre-1771, anyway.”
He heard the rustle of her leaning forward. How he wished she would do that when his eyes were on her, when there was no technical business at hand. But she belonged to a dead man yet, however the live might yearn for her.
She murmured: “As I make it, the jumps should be gradated sharply. Probably fifty years is the minimum — forty-nine, actually — because you can’t jump from the end of one loop to the middle of the one adjacent, or from place to place within your own. The larger loops should be multiples of these, since they’re made out of looplets, and then there could be multiples of those — we don’t know how far it extends. Even a slight change in the angle of our jump could shift us from the smalls to the mediums or worse. If we assume each level is the square of the prior one, first level being roughly fifty years, the second would be two and a half thousand years and the third six and a quarter million — light-years. So just keep calm until you know which level it is.”
“Six and a quarter million?” he repeated, comprehending her reason for the private discussion. “That — that could put us in another galaxy!”
“Not likely. Probably in intergalactic space. But as I said, the local light survey places us definitely within a galactic structure, and since you found Earth where it was supposed to be, the odds are it is our own. I conjecture level two, therefore.”
“Two and a half thousand.” It was still appalling — and she wasn’t sure. It was possible, if unlikely, that this was merely an Earthlike planet occupying the same spot in another galaxy or cluster that Earth occupied in the Milky Way. Perhaps every galaxy was laid out on a common plan. Cepheid variables, novas, planets, all fitting into their destined slots…
He abolished it as fantasy. “That’s before the Christian era.”
She made no reply, but he felt her closeness, her excitement. To peer into ancient history! No man had done such a thing so directly before.
“Oh what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea? / Somehow my soul seems suddenly free—”
She replied: “Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free / Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!” And she touched his hand.
Thus did she confess to him that she knew of Sidney Lanier and what he signified in Ivo’s life, and perhaps had known from the beginning; and her hand now squeezing his own suggested an added meaning to the words she quoted. Candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free? He dared not hope; it was most likely an intellectual game, for her.
He had tried to emulate the qualities of Lanier the person, to mold his character after that of his adopted ancestor — but it had not worked. Ivo could not create poetry, and he totally lacked Lanier’s winning ways with the ladies. How much better off he would have been to develop a personality truly his own!
“Jump it to Europe,” Afra said.
He jumped it to Europe. The time was noon at Rome — and there was no settlement of man there. “Pre-Roman,” he announced.
“Try Egypt.”
“Nothing at Alexandria,” he said after a moment. “Not even dry land.”
“Naturally not, if it’s pre-Roman. You want Memphis.”
He headed southeast, toward the noncoded location, feeling out of sorts again.
On an eastern channel of the Nile delta he discovered a bustling city, not large by his expectations but with the aura of a capital of some sort. Memphis?
“Doesn’t sound like it,” Afra said. “But any city is good news for us. Look for a palace or a temple; see if you can find written records to photograph. We should be able to date those.”
Ivo obliged, descending to street level near a complex of buildings he took to be significant. The street was narrow and filthy, lined by tiny mud-brick dwellings set close together and generally no more than a single story high. He could make out the straw coating of the weathered bricks, and fancied he could almost sniff the surrounding slum offal. Inferior residential districts had not begun with America, certainly!
The natives were human: slender, swarthy Mediterraneans with black hair and brown eyes. A number were naked, and these he presumed were slaves; their racial types were variable, ranging from Nordic blond to full black. Even the clothed ones gained little; they possessed none of the glorious habiliment he had thought of as ancient Egyptian. There were no gold ornaments or bright cloths, and not even shoes or sandals. Barefoot, bareheaded, the men were clad only in the wraparound schenti: white cloth held at the waist by a wide leather belt, the outfit reaching only to the knees. The women wore long tight skirts and a number were bare-breasted. The effect would have
been delightful, had they been young, healthy and clean; these were not.
At the temple/palace grounds things changed abruptly. There were no women, and the men were much better dressed. They wore wide, short wigs, hairpiece quality a seeming guide to status. They wore full skirts with a short sleeve for the left arm only and overset by a pleated mantle of linen. Evidently the people he had seen on the street were of the lowest class.
Some stone was in evidence, but up close the structures were hardly impressive. The jewelry the personnel wore furnished most of the temple color.
He explored several private cells, finding them routinely occupied. If this were a place of worship, it was decadent; if a palace, the Pharaoh was far away. One section even seemed to be still under construction. Here there were guards, their spears, axes and pear-shaped shields set aside as they watched lethargic slaves chipping stone under the supervision of a harried elderly taskmaster. There was no particular brutality about it; only the supervisor — probably the responsible one — showed any urgency, and his gesticulations went largely unheeded.
Ivo came in for a closer look, knowing that where there was activity of this nature there had to be some kind of blueprint or written directive. If that document were dated, or carried the name of the chief executive—
At this point another man came into the scene. His hair was divided and partly shaved above the ears, and he had a long braided lock falling in front of one ear and curling up at the end. Two bright feathers decorated the remainder of his hair. His arms were tattooed, as were his thighs, in crosshatched patterns. He wore a wrap of decorated fabric that looped around the body and anchored to one shoulder, the hem richly bordered.
This man looked up, facing Ivo. His mouth parted in an O of surprise. He gesticulated.
The guards woke up. In a moment they were beside the man, bright headpieces in place, short-sleeved metal shirts gleaming, ox-hide shields up. There were many more of them than Ivo had suspected. Some must have been summoned by the commotion from elsewhere on the grounds. Many were Egyptian, while others were racially similar to the recent arrival. Ivo realized he was dealing with a superimposition of cultures. The Egyptians must have been conquered recently.
The feather-headed man pointed. There was no question who commanded, here. The guards lifted their spears, and some dropped back to notch arrows. All looked toward Ivo.
They saw him!
Now the slaves were looking too, desisting from their labors. Frightened, they clustered on the far side of the court, while the guards formed a defensive line. Postures were aggressive, but no one took action. They were waiting for the command.
“What is it?” Afra’s voice demanded nearby, jolting him. He had thought for a moment that one of the guards had spoken audibly — a ridiculous notion. Thousands of years separated scene from viewer, and the macroscope did not transmit sound.
Almost as ridiculous a notion, actually, as that of these men of the past seeing Ivo, as though this were merely a window.
The feathered leader made his decision. His mouth moved as he barked commands. The guards began to move, closing in on—
Without answering Afra, Ivo manipulated the controls convulsively and shot straight up two hundred feet, instinctively fleeing from the situation. The faces of the warriors turned up to follow him, and he could see that they were afraid.
“Ivo, you saw something!” Afra persisted.
“Nothing,” he said, feeling himself shaking. Lanier had had courage! “Must be a little tired.” He was drifting far above the city now, finding a certain birdlike security in height.
“Maybe you should take a break,” she said with concern. “These transformations are weakening us all, and we don’t know how much of your strength this searching draws. No point in risking—”
“I’m okay.” He was ashamed to admit what form his fatigue had taken, and did not trust the result of his observation. Non-Egyptians in ancient Egypt? As rulers? He was sure Egypt had done the conquering, not the reverse.
Of course he had become sleepy, letting a dream-image replace that of the scope. He had known something like that to happen when reading: the words on the page would become more and more fantastic, until with a start he realized that his eyes were closed. Returning to the real book he would find his place, noting where the mundane text diverged from the astonishing vision — only to drift off again similarly.
He understood that this could happen to a fatigued driver, too. The man would spy something incredible, like an ocean liner crossing at an intersection, and realize that he was dreaming at the wheel. If he were sensible, he would pull over immediately and rest, lest the next nod be fatal. The mind had intriguing ways to sublimate strain.
He was tired; that explained it, though he did not feel depleted. Perhaps it was not so much a physical effect as a psychic one. Knowing how far they had ranged from Earth — so far that light reflected from their base of operations, the planet Neptune, would not reach home for thousands of years — knowing this, he unconsciously sought a closer identification with the home planet. He wanted to step into the world he saw, somehow, much as a child wanted to step into a storybook picture. A world of ancient adventure and glory, where the threat of nuclear holocaust or mind-destruction did not exist. For all its primitive faults, a better world…
If it happened again, he would quit. Afra was right; there was no point in wearing himself out, when his mission was so important. A misreading of a year or two might throw them a light-year or two off course. Better to be sensible: to wait a few hours and do it properly, than to risk inaccurate information.
And it was important, he reminded himself again. They were not just traveling; they were attempting to map the convolutions of the cosmos as the jump cycles penetrated them, and in that sense an error of as much as a day might invalidate the phase. How much would a tiny inaccuracy be magnified by a large jump? There was no point in the map unless it were precise, and without the map they would never be able to return physically to Earth. Only the macroscope could pinpoint their location so exactly; the telescope, over a distance of a thousand light-years, was a blunderbuss.
“You know best, Ivo,” she said quietly.
Almost, he quit then. “Thanks,” he said, meaning it. “I don’t think Egypt is doing us much good. Where else should I try?”
“You might try Damascus. That’s traditionally the oldest city in the world, and a very important one. Move northeast about four hundred miles—”
“On my way.” He could jump there instantly by touching the correct coding, since Damascus was on the list; but he preferred to make the trek by, as it were, his own power. It gave him badly needed confidence.
He shot across the delta of the Nile at jet-plane velocity and intersected the coastline. His route would take him over the southwest corner of the Mediterranean Sea — probably the same route used by the Egyptian ships in the course of trade or war with Asia minor. Except that he was high above the ground. Even so must the fabulous spirits of Near East legend have swooped in minutes over land and sea — the godlets, the genii, gaseous creatures of malevolence and power. Their number was supposed to have been severely curtailed by Biblical King Solomon, who confined them to bottles when they would not swear fealty to him. Some were said to have remained helpless in such confinement for thousands of years. Could they be considered in fact travelers via the macroscope, able to witness without participating? What a horrible fate, to be corked forever, sentient, within a tiny sphere!
Time had passed during his sojourn in the land of Egypt, and his exodus was late. The day was terminal, dusk approaching, and he was traveling into it. The descending sun sparkled from the waves and tinted the edges of clouds. “How still the plains of the waters be! / The tide is in his ecstasy. / The tide is at his highest height: / And it is night.” And what if this were the Mediterranean instead of the marshes of Glynn? The words of the poet still applied.
A ship came into sight upon the ocean. He swerved
to study it: a stout galley, a dozen or fifteen oars stroking the water rhythmically on each side. So they really did use them, in the olden days! It had a mast, but the sail was furled: not enough wind. Probably anxious to get home tonight, he thought fondly, and no wonder; this ship could not be much over fifty feet long. Compared to the modern liners, a thousand feet from stem to stern (he smiled a little wistfully, remembering Brad’s pun)… though this one did not appear to have much of a stem… or even the three-hundred-foot sailing ships…
No. This toy dared not stray far from its port.
He was too low, too slow; he wanted to reach Damascus before nightfall. He could not afford to tarry beside every curiosity along the way, tempting as such diversions might be.
He lifted — and did not rise. The ocean was nearer now, less placid; the green waves slopped randomly fifty feet beneath him. He felt cold.
He concentrated on the macroscopic controls, closing his eyes to the scene around him. If this were a second snooze, he wanted to pull out of it before admitting defeat. Pride required at least an orderly retreat. If it were a momentary slip of the fingers, no problem. The spherical control was in his right hand, guiding his journey as he automatically adjusted it, hardly conscious of his manipulation. A twist—
The ball was gone! His fingers closed on air.
He opened his eyes. The living liquid was twenty feet below and he was falling.
He grabbed at the goggles. His hand smacked into his bare face.
“Ivo!” Afra’s voice, from a distance.
The water struck, the force and chill of it numbing his naked body. Brine slapped into his eyes, his mouth, blinding and choking him.
He forgot about the niceties of perception and probability, and swam. His head broke surface and he coughed out the spume fogging his lungs and shook the sting from his eyes.
Macroscope Page 29
