Edge of Time

by Donald A. Wollheim (as David Grinnell)

  "But perhaps not too observant," said Enderby.

  Warren waved a hand. "With all the planets that should be covered, what can we lose? Besides it might be valuable to get a female transferal, at least once. She did master photography, you know—she might prove quite apt along certain lines of that sort—perhaps a powerful visual memory."

  Enderby glanced around. There were smiles on the other men's faces. Steiner nodded, Marco grinned; Weidekind, Williams, Rendell, Hyatt, all approved.

  "That settles it," said Enderby. "Call in the girl and well get her started."

  The meeting broke up. Warren went with Williams over to the records hall. Marge was at the developing tanks with Stanhope hovering nearby. She looked surprised when Warren told her.

  "Golly!" she said. "That's wonderful! I didn't really think he'd ever give me a break. You fellows had all the fun. I'm starting now?"

  At Warren's nod, she started out. "Oh, Lordy. I've got to fix myself up. My hair's a mess, and—"

  "Hey," said Warren, "you're not really going anywhere. They'll never see you—not the real you. In fact the whole thing will be over in an hour or so."

  "Maybe they'll never see the real me, but I'll think about it, just the same," the girl retorted. "After all, if you think I'm going to lie there unconscious, looking like something out of a circus side show, you'd better think again. After all, how do I know who's coming into this place while I'm a-sleep? Mr. Carlyle might even pop up for a visit!"

  She took herself forthwith to her room, and came down fifteen minutes later, hair redone, lipstick renewed, a fresh dress on.

  Once in the transferal chamber, she planked herself down, took the injection without even wincing. "Where to?" she asked.

  "We're shooting blind," said Williams. "We've never had adequate photos or coverage of the packed center of the microcosmic galaxy. The stars are too densely packed there for good results from telephotography. So we're just going to aim your mind telescopically at the mass of central hub stars and let it rove until something phases. You're going to get a brand-new world all for yourself."

  "Hey," she said, "you've got me a little uneasy now. I just wanted a nice comfortable, familiar world."

  Warren shook his head, and resting a hand on her shoulder pushed her into a reclined position while Williams adjusted the viewer. In another moment she was raptly staring into the microcosm, into the great blazing mass of shining stars at its center. In another minute she had drifted off, as she lay recumbent and unconscious on the frame.

  Warren and Williams sat in the little chamber, chatting while Marge remained quiet for the better part of an hour. Once or twice she mumbled something in an odd language. The rest of the time, she was still, her face pale and tense.

  Once Jack Quern looked in, saw the girl and scowled. "Watcha using her for?" he asked. "She's a nice kid, but not for that kind of stuff. Taking advantage of her, that's what!"

  "Okay," said Warren. "We aren't hurting her. She'll probably talk your ear off when she wakes up."

  Jack nodded. "We got a date to go walking in the woods tonight after supper. There's a full moon."

  Williams smiled when Jack left. "Romantic cuss, isn't he? Doesn't look the type at all."

  Warren merely shrugged. He didn't object to Marge's romancing with both Jack and Kenster. She was obviously having a good time, but he was afraid one of them was going to take her seriously sooner or later. In a way, Warren felt responsible for her. She was a likable youngster, and good at her job. Pretty, too.

  He glanced at her, and his mind ran on speculations having nothing to do with the future history of galaxies. With an effort he dragged himself back to the moment.

  Marge woke up suddenly, and her first word was, "Darn it, I'll miss the festival, after all!"

  She sat up and looked around. "And it was going to be such a bang-up affair. We worked for it a whole month, and I had really a big part in it. I was sure that Bidra was going to get the spot—but was I glad when she didn't!"

  "Whoa!" said Warren. "Whoever you were probably did make it. Just Marge McElroy wasn't there. And without your camera, what could you have wanted?"

  The girl put her hand to her head a moment. "You know, you're right. I guess I'd rather be here than there anyway. All that dance ritual and star worship rehearsal kept me real busy—or rather it all kept the other me—Trince—busy."

  "And now you're going to be real busy writing down every little thing that happened to you," Williams said crisply. "Get to that desk, Marge, and start writing before you forget any of it."

  Obediently the girl went to the desk. Warren asked one question before she picked up the pen. "Did they have space flight where you were?"

  "Oh, yes," she said, starting to write. "They'd had it for centuries. With all those stars in the sky—thousands and thousands of them, and those white nights—space flight was a natural."

  She looked up at them a moment. "That sky—I never saw anything like it! It was all blazing, even at night. It made our own stars seem so tiny and far away." She shook her head and bent to her writing.

  Warren was anxious to hear the rest of her story; for there seemed something piquant at the thought of this girl, sometimes naive, sometimes with an almost worldly feminine cunning, so definitely the product of her times, wandering far afield in alien worlds with alien histories. She seemed none the worse for it though, and he forebore from interfering with her.

  As a matter of fact, he didn't have time to wait for her to finish her script. For he was due in the transferal chamber next. Even before Marge was quite done writing, she was asked to shift to another room to finish, while Warren was prepared for his own transferal.

  This time the telescopic trigger was not directed at the original planet Komar but merely in the general astronomic neighborhood. Once a connection had been established, it seemed to become easier and easier for the mental phasing to take place. The social pattern on the micro-cosmic star, its people and the transferee's assumed personality, all left a residue in the memory, as of several months' actual residence there for each short transferal.

  Warren sank under the image and the drug. He felt himself blacking out, he felt the same moment of vertigo, then felt himself sitting somewhere. There were voices around him, the sounds of haste and movement, a screeching of small wheels, bumps and bangs as if things were being dropped.

  His vision cleared, he looked around. He was sitting at a rough table, a writing instrument in his hand, checking off items on a long sheet of paper. He was tired, and he felt as if he had been sitting there for many hours longer than his usual work day.

  About him was a scene of hustling, almost frenetic activity. His seat was at the entrance of a gigantic spacecraft which was in the process of being loaded. But this work was emergency, his mind told him. He recalled that he had been checking off the cargo as it was rushed up, checking and ordering until he was bone-weary. But the work had to be done.

  Trucks, rolling on several sets of wheels were being unloaded before the ship's hold. Men, equally weary, haggard in appearance, were unloading, carrying, and wheeling the objects into the ship. They would seem to make little sense, judging by ordinary space cargos—which were generally raw materials, manufactured goods in quantity, objects of art peculiar to special worlds, foods from the home world that would fetch high prices in export, and so forth. But this was no commercial cargo.

  There were loads of household goods, hastily tied together with plastic ropes. There were trunks and boxes of clothing—not new clothing, but the everyday clothes of people. There were crated works from the leading museums, the famous paintings, the sterosculp masters, the visi-music machines. There were hasty loads of concentrated foods, the most nutrient in the smallest packages, regardless of flavor. The loading had been going on for eight days, and was nearly over.

  Next would be the people. Dimly he heard the noises and shuffling of the crowds that had already arrived and had been waiting patiently. He had paused in
the contemplation of this discovery, too tired to rack his new brain for the answers, when a voice spoke next to him:

  "Dozing off again, Commander? Better let me finish the job. You go on home, pack your own stuff, get some sleep, and come aboard with your family tomorrow at take-off time. We don't really need you more today."

  Warren jerked his nodding head up, looked around. The speaker was his second officer, gnarled Szek. He stared at him a moment, nodded. "You're right," he said. "I can't keep this up. Take the desk."

  Warren got up. The other, an old space-hand whose bald Komarian head was speckled from long exposure to cosmic rays, took over the endless task of listing the incoming cargo. Warren, now in the body and mind of Neith Heart-in-hand, commander of the great space cruiser Formidable of the Ultra-Komarian Empire's navy, made his way out of the enclosure separating the vast battle craft from the throng of civilians outside. All around him the bustle of loading continued. Once outside the gates, the crowd respectfully made way for him, recognizing him as the man who would be responsible for their safety.

  He flew to his home in one of the suburbs in a single-seater rent-o-plane. As he sailed over the nearly deserted city, he looked down on it and was sad, for the city had been a great one and the planet, Morlna, a proud planet, one of the great colonial descendants of ancient Komar. The city itself was seven hundred years old, the planet's colony only eight hundred.

  Now it was to vanish.

  Warren's mind searched the thoughts of Neith's brain and the story was awe-inspiring. It had been a thousand years after the first landing on another star's planet, and that first starship had returned with half its brave crew missing. But it had been succeeded by others, and the men and women of Komar had forced a toehold on the worlds of other stars; forced, held, and finally conquered them. The sagas of planetary colonies were magnificent; none, he thought, more so than the story of his own world.

  There had been troubles and dangers, massacres, and plagues. The first small villages and settlements had survived, spread out, and Morlna had prospered. Now, it was a world that had seen millions of happy citizens. And it was a doomed world. For the sun about which Morlna revolved was about to become a nova. It was about to burst into a ball of atomic fire many times its present size; it would explode within itself.

  The heat and fire of the coming nova would utterly destroy all life-forms on Morlna. The surface would be scorched, the atmosphere burned away. But they had had warning, and the entire Empire of twenty-nine planets on twenty stars had united to rescue the people of Morlna.

  The space fleet had been sent, the cruisers and battle craft, the explorer vessels, the cargo vessels, the freighters, the passenger liners. For two years all had been busy, carting away people and possessions. Now there was but the cruiser Formidable, its interior ripped out to make room for two thousand fleeing passengers and their possessions. They were the last two thousand people of the planet, the last citizens of the great city that had been Neith's home.

  Neith arrived home, a spreading, pleasant many-roomed building on the green park that surrounded the city. His wife and two children welcomed him, and he was so tired that he went right to sleep. He awoke in the early dawn, and knew the time had come. He packed his family in the family air scooter, piled in their bags, and turned for a last look. For a long moment Neith and his wife looked at their home, looked at the things they could not take and would never see again save in the tri-D pictures stored among their treasures.

  Then they returned to the Formidable. The two thousand passengers had almost completely filed in. Inside, Neith saw that his crew, directed by his medical officers and pharmacist ratings, had been putting them under suspension and stacking the unconscious forms in narrow bins like so much cordwood. But this was the practical way; it saved space, it saved food, it prevented disharmony.

  He kissed his own wife and children good-by, and they too were taken for suspension. Then he went to the bridge.

  There was a delay of two more hours while the last of the cargo was stored, while the ship was checked for space-worthiness. There was a strange silence among the crew— mainly men of Morlna. At the bridge Neith and Szek silently stared at the landscape.

  "It looks so calm and peaceful," remarked Neith finally. "You wouldn't know."

  The other assented. "But I think already the sun is brighter." Neith looked up, strained his eyes to where the sun was rising in the morning sky. "You may imagine it," he said. 'The time is not for a few more hours."

  "May I remind you that the astronomers were not so definite. They can only estimate the approximate time, not the exact time. I still think it looks strange," was Szek's rejoinder.

  And Warren/Neith looked again, studied it. It looked as if there might be some truth to this observation. It did seem like simply a bright sun on a clear morning, yet perhaps it was a bit brighter. He squinted a moment more, then, turning, pressed the general alarm bell.

  At the sound of the gongs throughout the ship, the crew hastened their work. It meant take-off in a few minutes. Hastily they waved the last person inside, bolted and sealed the ports. The second alarm made the ship ready, and at the third, the ship gently rose on its anti-gravitational beams, heading for the skies.

  At the bridge Neith and Szek were strained, watching the automatic registers of the ascendancy into the dark of space, and at the same time watching the alarming changes already taking place in the sun. For the great star was already beginning its internal disruption. Its coronal display was several times greater than had ever been seen before; some of the flames now ascending to what Neith mentally supposed must be a million miles. He ordered the utmost acceleration.

  The starship leaped forward. Soon the planet Morlna was but a great green-and-blue globe, partly lighted by the flaming sun, and hanging in the blackness of space. Neith could see its main continent, the land mass known as Dau-volna, the land of Dau, in honor of the first master of space. He could see its bays and inlets, its two great rivers, its mountain ranges.

  Even as he watched he could see the clouds gathering across the face of the land and seas as the unusual heat of the enlarging sun struck the surface. Now he noticed clouds of black along the green surface and knew them to be forest fires springing up everywhere.

  The world fell back, dwindled rapidly as the ship sped outward, away from the sun, away from Morlna's orbit. Even as it sped, he could see the sky of Morlna darkening, turning gray with clouds and smoke. Turning elsewhere he could see the sun that had once been so friendly, glowing bright and white and furious, already had expanded to twice its size, and was still rapidly growing.

  He rang for more speed, but they had already reached the maximum so close to a sun. The Formidable was accelerating at its top rate. In another few minutes it would be nearly at the speed of light. The speed was barely enough. For the sun's rays were traveling at the full speed of light, and before the ship would get far enough away in space to be safe, the new increased blast of heat would catch them.

  There were no other ships in space. The last freighters had left two days before and were safely beyond, on their way to the nearer stars.

  The Formidable sped on; the sun exploded behind them. Its planets reduced to ashes, its appalling light finally reached out into space and caught up with the speeding starship. Within the ship it was as if the vessel had been struck a blow by a great hand. There was a perceptible jolt. The ship's insulation fought to hold the inner temperature at a bearable point. Inside the air warmed steadily.

  Neith fought with the controls, knowing he dare not increase the ship's speed—and, as a matter of fact, any possible increase would be too slight to matter. With despair he knew there was but one course left to him. He must drive on and hope that eventually they would outreach the great circle of incredible heat from the exploding sun.

  The heat within the ship grew steadily greater, and various little elements began to show signs of going haywire. One by one the refrigeration mechanisms blew from the
strain. The atomic piles were showing evidence of an overload of incoming energy. The cosmic ray drive was swaying off the usual streams due to the impact.

  Finally the ship's engines blew altogether. There was a terrible period of darkness, as all over the ship light and power went out—the atomic piles completely shorted by a flow of energies unparalleled in space history. In darkness and deadness the Formidable tore on, its course askew, its cosmic stream diverted.

  Neith carried on as best he could, but he finally succumbed under the strain. He felt himself slipping into unconsciousness, a mass of raw skin and dripping perspiration. At last he blacked out. . . .

  He came to consciousness he did not know when. The ship was still traveling. He lifted his head from the control board to note that the lights were on, and the board again functioning.

  Beside him Szek stirred, then the others. Buzzers began to sound on his board which indicated that all over the ship the crew were returning to their posts.

  A hasty check of the ship showed that it was again in action. Apparently the Formidable had managed, after all, to elude the outer edges of the nova. And once away from the distortion, the atomic engines reasserted themselves, the cosmic stream took hold again.

  Neith/Warren took survey of the ship's position among the stars. For a moment he was nonplused. He rapidly re-checked the course, and there was no doubt of it; the ship had been shifted considerably. Also, it had been moved incredibly faster than its best speed under its own power. And at sometime—there was no telling how long everyone had been unconscious—the Formidable had passed its original objective, a new colonial planet of the next star. Now, unbelievably, that star was behind them—a good dozen light years behind them—and he was taking his ship and two thousand sleeping passengers into new and unexplored stellar territory.

  While the crew were checking the cargo and the unconscious passengers, Neith and his officers worked out their position. They started to bring the great ship around in a vast circle which would bring it on an orbit through the sector of unknown space and out finally into the circuit of another outpost of the Ultra-Komarian Empire. But it would be a long trip—one of dozens of years by planetary standards —and the crew realized that when they did arrive they would find themselves having long been listed among the dead. But there was no other possible course. And so Neith set