The Time Axis

by Henry Kuttner

  But they met Murray's eyes. "Wait!" he barked at them sharply. "Halt!"

  Confused, they fell back a little. They would obey him – for a moment. So long as they thought he was Paynter.

  Was he Paynter?

  He turned a bewildered gaze to me, murmuring thickly, "Cortland, what's happened? I've been dreaming, haven't I? Dreaming I was a man named Paynter?"

  There was a restless surge among the soldiers. They were muttering to their officers, uncertain, ready to be swayed one way or the other. Paynter – Murray – turned back to them.

  "Halt!" he shouted again. "Wait for your orders!"

  It worked – for awhile. But they would not wait long. Commands could not stop them from thinking. And I knew that if Murray told them to drop their weapons their indecision would crystallize into disobedience.

  But the solution was very simple after all.

  A gray light flickered around us, vanished, steadied again. A thin humming began. The light seemed to gather upon every dust-mote in the air, thickening in veil beyond veil. The soldiers faded into misty ghosts ...

  Belem lifted his head wearily. "We're all here now," he said. "Cortland, Murray – "

  " – Dr. Letta Essen –"

  Only then did I turn my head. Kneeling beside the original force-field device was Topaz, her fingers flickering over its controls.

  Not Topaz, I thought. Not now. The face was hers, and the body, but when she glanced up and smiled it was Letta Essen's keen gray eyes that met mine. Hypnosis had released her, as it had released Murray, from the prison of the alien bodies, the alien minds.

  "Now I will join you," Belem said, and turned to face the spinning tree.

  There was silence under the dome of gray light.

  When the Mechandroid turned he was still a man-machine but it was De Kalb who looked at us out of the metal eyes. He smiled. "Goodbye to Belem," he said. "We're here again, all of us."

  "But why did it happen – why?" Letta Essen spoke with the voice of Topaz but it was unmistakably her own mind framing the thought and the words.

  "I think I can guess," De Kalb said, through Belem's lips. "It was no accident that stranded us temporarily in this era. We set out to fight a battle, the four of us against the nekron. Well, I think we have fought that battle. I think what happened was a testing-field in which each of us was tried and found – useful. Now we go on to the final battle."

  "And the nekronic killer with us," I said.

  "The killer too. That is part of the pattern, I think."

  "But wait a minute," Murray said. "What's become of this fellow Paynter? Where's Belem? Where's Topaz? And Cortland, were you always yourself?"

  "The others are recessive in our minds, I think," De Kalb said. "Just as once we were recessive in theirs. Cortland's alter ego has always been recessive. Only he hasn't changed – except in that he changed bodies, as we all did. Why that had to happen I don't know – yet. Remember, Cortland has always been our catalyst. When he enters the picture things happen!"

  "There's one thing that isn't going to happen," I said. "We can't get our bodies back, can we? These we borrowed. Or stole, if you want the accurate truth. The real owners are sleeping, maybe. But will we ever dare sleep? Will we ever be sure well waken as ourselves? Each of us is a double mind in a single body now. If we come out alive from the world of the Face, what's going to happen then?"

  "We'll know that," De Kalb said firmly, "when we wake again. We will sleep, Cortland. And whichever ego wakes at the end of the world will be the ego that was predestined to wake."

  He hesitated briefly. "Now we must go," he said. "Look at the tree, Cortland. Murray, Letta – watch the tree. We will know the real truth – but later, much later – when we waken at the end of the world. When we look into the Face of Ea."

  23. THE FACE

  Time turned on and on upon its axis where we slept.

  Time flowed like a river, wheeled like a sphere, moved like a galaxy through its own unimaginable dimensions toward its own inexorable ends. Motionless at the heart of motion, we slept on.

  I think I dreamed.

  Perhaps it was a dream in which the waters of time parted above us like a Red Sea parting and, through the walls of water, inquiring faces looked down into mine, mouthed words in unknown languages that came to me faintly from far away. If it was a dream, the dream wore thin for an interval and I could almost hear them, almost feel their hands on me, tugging me awake.

  And then, among them, a deep serene powerful command seemed to break and through the parted waters of sleep and time I looked up dimly into the face I had last seen beneath the cocoon of fight, still in its natal slumber. But this time I saw the calm quicksilver eyes and heard the calm voice running deep with power.

  The eyes met mine. Their command was irresistible, and the command was –

  Sleep.

  The waters closed over me again …

  As dreams repeat themselves in interrupted slumber, it seemed to me that this dream returned. The quiet of turning time wore thin and I looked up again into inquisitive faces seen from far away, felt inquisitive hands plucking me awake. But these were strange faces, so strange I was startled a little out of my oblivion and all but sat up in my shock as I saw them.

  Above the clustering misshapen heads the great calm figure of the Man-Machine loomed. I knew him by his eyes and by the deep humming tide of power that flowed from his mind to mine, silencing the chatter, healing over the breach in time. But I would not have known him, I think, except for that.

  For long eons had passed in that measureless interval. The serene face was changing. But the tide of his command had not changed at all. He still said to me, "Sleep," and I slept again.

  Once more the dream returned. This time it was not faces that looked down at me but small, sharp, twinkling lights, insistent, deeply troubling. And as I roused enough to turn my head aside, trying to escape them, I had one glimpse of quicksilver eyes beneath calm brows, one remote echo of a voice that rolled like thunder. The lights vanished like candle-flames in a hurricane.

  The thunder was so deep that it had tangible volume, rolled from a tangible source. I knew how mighty the source was. I knew, from that glimpse of the quicksilver eyes, how tremendously they had changed. The Man-Machine was no longer the size and shape of man. The face had changed, the functions had changed, the size was too vast for my dazed mind to comprehend.

  "Sleep," the thunder commanded through diminishing vistas of space and time. And this time I sank into depths so profound that no dreams could plumb them.

  I had thought that, when the time came, I would have much to write about the Face of Ea, that stands in the twilight of the world's end. But now, when I try, the words are hard to find. I have seen things no human being ever saw before. But the paradox is that it can't be communicated. Between experience and inexperience lies a gulf that can be bridged in one way and one way only.

  You would have to go, as we went, to time's end and stand before the Face of Ea. Then I could tell you what I saw – and then I wouldn't need to tell you, for you would know.

  I awoke.

  The long, long sleep drained slowly out of my mind, like water receding down a sloping beach, leaving me stranded in a place I had never seen before. This was the time-axis – but it had changed. I looked with blank eyes around the dome that closed us in, a thin, gray dome through which red light filtered. We were no longer underground. I suppose the mountains had worn away, grain by grain, while we slept.

  Murray's was the first face I saw. I thought to myself, "Is it Murray this time or is it Paynter?" I watched him sit up on the gray floor, rubbing his face dazedly, his flesh pink in that filtering light. And I never knew whether it was Murray or Paynter.

  Beyond him De Kalb looked at me with metallic eyes, smiled and sat up. And Topaz lifted her bright curls from the dusty floor and turned swiftly from face to face, a glance that combined Letta Essen and herself in indissoluble unison.

  "Are we t
here?" she asked in a soft voice.

  For answer I gestured toward the gray dome that shut us in, the world outside the dome.

  As far as we could see, in every direction but one, the world lay flat and gray with a surface very familiar to us all in one way or another. A glazed grayness, solid, through which veins of rosy color, like curled hair, twined at random. The world was all nekronic matter now – except for one other thing.

  We looked up at the Face of Ea, and we were silent.

  As we looked, the dome above us shimmered, thinned, was gone. Down upon us the red twilight poured unbroken. It was faintly warm upon the skin. A very faint wind blew past us and I can remember still the strange hollow odors it carried, wholly unlike anything I had ever scented before from winds blowing over open country.

  We did not speak again, any of us. The time for talk had passed and a higher authority from that moment took all initiative out of our hands. We looked up at the Face of Ea.

  How can I tell you what it was like – now? You know how I saw it in the Record, when the images of this same scene recreated themselves in my mind and I looked up from this same spot, in a faraway age, into the towering Face. Even then I saw it as a Face far transcending the human, reflecting experiences unknown to my era and my world, complex beyond any possible human guessing.

  When I looked up now and saw the vast cliffside rising above the gray nekronic plain, it was not as a Face I saw it. Not at first. It was too complex to be recognizable. It was shaped into equations so far beyond my comprehension that I could not read them in terms of a human likeness.

  I suppose a Piltdown man, gazing from under his eye-ridges at the face of a Toynbee or an Einstein would realize only very remotely that this was the face of an evolved member of his own species. And there were greater gulfs than that between the Face and me.

  You will have guessed already what likeness it was that I finally recognized. I should have guessed too. It was not very surprising, really. Belem had given me the clue. A city, he had told me, was simply a machine for human living, an extension of the Mechandroid organism. And this city, which was the Face. It looked down at us with a vast calm gaze, the same gaze that had brooded over our slumbers while time turned on its axis where we slept. The eyes that had once been quicksilver metal were very different now but I knew that gaze. The voice that had once run deeper and deeper with the volume of its power was a voice no longer, for it had passed beyond the need for a voice. The thing that had once been a Man-Machine had grown, developed, changed, synthesized with all of human living as the millennia went by.

  Its functions had broadened to encompass every aspect of the civilizations through which it passed.

  I understood very little of the complex symbiosis which had taken place, and I can convey only a very small part of what I understood. For mankind had changed too. Perhaps love and hate and fear survived but not in the forms we know. Perhaps human features were not so different as we imagined. Perhaps, through the streets and plazas of the city, which had begun as a Man-Machine and was now the cradle of the surviving race, men and women like ourselves really did move still.

  I'm not sure. I walked the streets. But I am still not sure among what crowds I walked.

  I've said the Face no longer needed a voice. This is why. In the old days I suppose the Man-Machine would have said, "Come," when it wanted us nearer. Now in effect it said, "Come" – and we came. But not on foot. Not under our own directions.

  A whole segment of unnecessary, primitive activities was simply eliminated. There was no need for the clumsy human mechanisms to hear the summons, comprehend it, consider it, debate obeying, decide to comply, set muscles in motion and trudge across the plain.

  Instead, the Face issued its voiceless command – and there was a sort of vortex in the red twilight air between the cliff-side and ourselves. Smoothly, gently, inexorably, we were drawn up along that spinning of the air, seeing the gray earth fall away beneath us and then slide backward with blurring swiftness. The Face grew startlingly larger, too large to see as a whole, large and near and very clear.

  We lost sight of the tremendous serene brow, of the vast smooth chin, of the great downward slope of the nose, of the cheeks etched with experiences which no human and no machine could ever have known separately.

  Walls of rock rushed at us, opened, sucked us in.

  What did I see? I wish I could tell you. I can make useless sketches in the air with both hands, trying to show how the spiral streets sloped and how the blurred house-fronts slid past. But if I did you would picture ordinary house-fronts and a street that curved but was like any street you know. And these were too different to describe.

  It may be that the street really did move with all its strange shapely houses. I have an idea that the whole interior of the city was actually in constant motion, as a machine might be, and that if motion ceased they would cease too, the city and the race of man.

  But I can tell you this much. Ideas blew through that city like puffs of smoke through an industrial town. They brushed my mind and were gone, leaving only bewildering fragments in their wake. Sometimes they brushed two of us at once and we had incredible glimpses into one another's minds wherever the idea touched, evoking mutual memories, interlocking thoughts like rings that spread in water.

  De Kalb had said, long ago, that these men were gods. He was right. They were far beyond any concept the men of my day had ever dreamed of for his gods. We walked through their city, were brushed by their thoughts, breathed the air of their streets, but we never saw them.

  They were there. They were all around us. I am perfectly sure of that. I didn't see them. I didn't feel or hear them. But I knew they were there as surely as you know the chair in which you sit now has a back upon which you are leaning, though you won't see it unless you turn.

  I had constantly the odd feeling that if I could turn I might come face to face with any man of the city I chose. But I was not capable of turning in the necessary direction, which would probably have been through a dimension we know nothing of.

  I wish I could have seen them.

  24. BATTLING THE NEKRON

  The gusts of thought blew thicker and faster around us as we were drawn up the spiral. Our minds linked in impossible chords and discords as impossible ideas struck responses from us all.

  Then the light failed us. Perhaps our sight failed us. I think we were drawn through a rather long space of solid wall, like a locked doorway which only this vortex could open for material things.

  When we could see again we were in a bare and empty room. The shape of it was indescribable because of the extensions along which it reached. I was reminded a little of the corridor down which Belem had guided me toward the Subterrane of the middle future. Geometry, blindingly confused in patterns of inverted planes.

  And then the room around us spoke directly, in the very air that pressed upon our minds. The Face of Ea spoke.

  I had heard that voice before, if voice you could call it The Man-Machine who guarded our age-long slumbers had said, "Sleep – sleep," in this same voice, growing deeper, calmer, less human as the eons passed. Now it was the voice and the mind of the Man-Machine but immeasurably altered, incomprehensibly more complex.

  "You have seen my first beginning," the Face of Ea said. "You and I have come together to this place at the end of our planet's life. I have watched over your sleep for a purpose. You are my weapons now.

  "The nekron can never be destroyed. But with your help it can be excised out of normal space, normal time. For that I summoned you. For that I guided your journeying in time. Think and you will understand."

  I believe the same knowledge flowed through the minds of my companions in the moment of timeless revelation that came to me. In a series of small, clear pictures I saw the manlike, killing creature that was the nekron, touching me as it swooped through oscillating time, becoming part human by the touch, running rampant through the worlds of humanity.

  "Because of its relea
se and its attacks," the voice of Ea said, "it is part human now. You have learned to fight it. To save yourselves and us you must finish the fight. The nekron cannot be touched – except by you. But we must somehow excise it out of the universe, not only in space but in time. We must cut back through time, so that we divide and alter the past as well as the present."

  Pictures flashed again through our minds but I at least was able to understand. I saw the worlds of the galaxy turning on their axis and, more cloudily, I saw time turning also, linked to the turning worlds each by its own axis as tangible as the planets themselves to that inner vision. Very dimly I saw something that flashed a little as Belem's severing lights had flashed when the two electronic matrices split in duplicates from the original.

  "I need a wedge, a blade, to split the nekronic infection from normal space and time," the voice went on. "You are my weapons. Do you understand the task before us?

  "Belem learned the way, through the linkage of the knowledge of two eras. Now, on an infinitely larger scale, we must accomplish the same cleaving of two spheres. And each must remain equal in every way to the one original or the balance of the universe will be destroyed.

  "They will differ – if we prevail – in one way only. One will be nekronic matter, one will be normal. Never in contact anywhere through all time and space. Do you understand your tasks?

  "You must fight as my weapons against the nekronic universe. Together we must cleave the universe itself in two."

  If you can imagine a sharp tool made sentient, you may guess a little of how what followed seemed to us, who were so integral a part of the tremendous conflict, the ultimate destruction.

  First, the voice died.

  Then there was movement past me and the room seemed to slip into darkness – or was if I that moved? Those corners of non-Euclidian shape were vortices that swept us apart. We four were the component parts of an exploding nova that shot outward through space, through time. Around me I saw stars, moving very swiftly, and I was alone and there was an inexplicable changing everywhere.