Chronocules

by D. G. Compton

  Looking ahead, Liza saw that they would soon be crossing the mouth of a small inlet. Among the thick, weed-fingered undergrowth she caught a glimpse of something white, and then another. Perhaps they had found the swans’ roosting place. She tapped Roses’ knee and pointed. He glanced over his shoulder, backed his oars. The boat slowed at once, stopped opposite the entrance to the inlet, and began to drift stem-first on the tide. He rowed gently, keeping in position while he examined what Liza had pointed at. He nosed the boat in closer.

  Two swans were in the tiny bay, dead, lightly caught by the overhanging branches, their wings drooping, their necks stretched out in the scum-marbled waters. They rose and fell dreamily on the small ripples caused by the oars, their feathers prodded by twigs. Shockingly, Liza could see through the water that their eyes were open.

  Roses dug an oar savagely, so that the boat wrenched sideways, shot under the branches, and struck the layered, rocky shore. Liza was thrown forward on the bilge- boards. Roses took no notice of her, but leaned out to haul one of the dead swans in on board. He pulled it by its neck, grunting angrily at the weight as he heaved

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  its body in over the side. It fell unceremoniously into the bottom of the boat, scattering slime. To Liza, in the dim evening light, it seemed enormous. And vile.

  “Bugger, bugger, bugger . . Roses was turning it over, sorting in its feathers. Its head hit the boat’s thwart with a sharp crack. “What done it? No blood, no nothing. What done it then?”

  Liza knew. She sat back in the stem, nauseated. “Pollution,” she said.

  “What’s that, then?”

  “The filth in the river.” Was it worth explaining? “The shit, the chemicals, the tons of rancid muck we fling into the water.”

  “Us? Us don’ fling no muck.”

  “Us people, Roses. All of us people.”

  Corporate guilt was beyond him. “Us don’ fling no

  muck, miss,” he repeated.

  Branches scraped the sides of the boat. The stench under the trees was appalling. “Shall we go now?” she said. “They’re dead. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

  She took one of the oars and poled them out backward. Roses was still fussing with the dead bird. They had to be rid of it. She leaned forward, meaning to show him gently what must be done. A shout came to them across the gray water.

  “Hey, you there. You in the yellow dinghy. What the hell d’you think you’re doing?”

  Two local lads coming up on the tide in a polyprylene rowing boat. Liza had been too occupied with the dead swan to notice their approach. She didn’t answer: confrontations with outsiders were to be avoided.

  “Are you deaf? I asked you what you were doing. You’ve got a swan there. Don’t you know they’re protected?”

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  Protected from what? she thought bitterly. But she said nothing. A Village employee, vulnerable, she was very afraid of getting involved. Roses had no such fears.

  “You bugger off,” he said. “Tidn none of your business. Us never did her no harm. Jus’ found her lyin’, that’s what.”

  The other boat was near now, the rower resting on his oars. His companion laughed. ,

  “Oooh arr,” he said, imitating Roses. They were locals, but with the diluted accents of their generation. “Oooh arr then, hark at he now, Harry. Idn’ none of us’s business, he says. Tell ’ee what, Harry—bet ’ee a penny to a pound he’m thacky old loony up to Penheniot.”

  His companion was greatly amused by such wit. Liza could see the situation developing.

  “Get out the oars, Roses'” she muttered. “There’s going to be trouble. Don’t argue with them—just get out the oars and row.”

  “Trouble?” Roses was used to the laughter of others. But he set the oars back in their rowlocks. !‘What sort of trouble?”

  “See that, Harry? They’re whispering. Do we like loonies who whisper? Loonies who come up here killing the swans? Do we? I don’t reckon we do, Harry.” Harry dipped an oar and drifted closer. “We don’t like stuck- up girls from that place neither. Shall we tip ’em in the water, Harry? See them swim home? Shall we?”

  Still Roses wouldn’t start rowing. “Didn’ kill no swans,” he said. “Found her lying, like I said. ’Nother of them in there too, in under them branches. See for yourself.” “Lot to say for himself, this loony. Shall we belt him? Belt him and fuck up the girl a bit?”

  The two boats were hardly five yards apart, moving out on the current into the middle of the half-mile-wide river. The only sound was the rustle of water around

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  the four dipped oars. Stars were beginning to shine in the white evening sky, and a lighted window very distantly among the trees. It was a grotesque encounter.

  “He’s speaking the truth,” Liza said. “It’s pollution that killed the swans. It’s killing all the other birds, and now it’s done for the swans.”

  “The girl knows, Harry. You can see she knows all right. Her sort always does.”

  She was wasting her breath. “Row, Roses. Let’s get away from here.”

  But the other boat was across their bow.

  “You let us by,” Roses said. “Us never did you no harm.”

  “A girl and a loony, Hany. What’re you waiting for?” Harry, who might have wanted none of it, pulled sharply till the boats were within feet of each other. His friend leaned out and caught the dinghy’s pram bow. Roses twisted around and smashed his fist down on the other’s fingers.

  “Bastard. You get him, Harry. Get him with the oar.” But Roses was quicker. On his feet now, delicately balanced in the lurching dinghy, he swung his own oar at waist height, striking Harry on the side of his head. Liza caught the other oar just as it was about to go overboard. Harry was flung sideways.

  “Christ, Pete—he’s broke my bloody jaw.”

  “Balls. You can move it, can’t you?”

  The two boats had been thrust apart. Roses stood, legs braced, breathing heavily, watching. Pete and Harry conferred, then brought their boat around to come up on the dinghy’s transom, where Liza sat. She thought Roses would take the opportunity this gave him to ship his oars and get away. But he stood watching. If they came up on the dinghy’s stem she’d be in the way and he wouldn’t be able to hit out. She looked around for a

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  weapon, could find nothing but a bailer, an old saucepan. She took it, and turned around on the rear thwart to be ready. Harry was backing his oars, the two boats approaching stem to stem. Pete had a boat-hook with a bright steel spike.

  “Sit ’ee down, miss,” she heard softly behind her. “Sit ’ee down and hold fast.”

  He told her what to do and she obeyed him. What else could she do, armed with nothing but an old tin saucepan?

  “Be you goin’ to let us be, or bain’t you?

  “Oooh arr, like hell us be.”

  She hated for him to expose himself to their mockery. They were closing fast, Petes boat-hook gleaming in the dull half-light. He must be planning to hole them with it. The thought of it entering her flesh was more than she could cope with. Suddenly the dinghy lurched, spun through ninety degrees under Roses’ feet as he twisted his whole body violently sideways. Pete was now not . two yards away, exactly amidships. He launched his boat-hook too late. Roses’ oar caught him across the bridge of his nose, smashing it, spattering blood instantly down his face, knocking him backward. He lay where he fell, without moving. The two boats bumped gently together.

  “Bloody buggers . . .” Roses waited, the heavy shaft of his oar still raised. “I said leave us be. Didn’ you hear?”

  Nobody laughed at him. He eased the other boat away, sat down, shipped his oars, and began to row. The last Liza saw of Harry he was kneeling up on the center thwart, splashing water in Pete’s face. One of his oars was overboar
d, drifting steadily away on the tide. The two of them were going to be there for some time. And she’d always thought of Roses as being so gentle. . . .

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  After a time she began to worry about repercussions. He rowed on steadily, humming the three notes he hummed when he was very pleased.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “You should have let them sink us. Once they’d sunk us they’d have let us alone. The O.S. is going to be furious.”

  “That’s as may be.” Roses rowed half a dozen strokes. “Trouble is, I don’ swim. Never seemed to get the way of it.”

  Later on, near the mouth of Penheniot Pill, he dumped the dead swan. He made no comment, simply tipped it overboard and sat for a moment, watching it move away on the tide. It floated with its wings half spread, its neck straight out, head supported on the water, almost as if it was flying. Soon it was no bigger than a scrap of tom paper against the gray dusk. Roses settled again to his rowing.

  Liza was right about the O.S. When David Silber- stein heard about the episode he was indeed furious. At that moment the Villages relationship with St. Kin- now was particularly delicate—the last thing he wanted was anything in the nature of a vulgar brawL He wasn’t afraid of the police—in that quarter the Founder appeared to have useful influence. But a story like this— suitably adjusted—would get around the town in half an hour flat. He rang Color Sergeant Cole to reassure himself about the state of the Village defenses.

  It had been his first meeting with Liza since the evening of . . . of Mrs. Lampton’s visit. He felt he had dealt with it remarkably well. He had decided he could feel relaxed about the laboratory incident—after all, Liza herself perfectly obviously hadn’t noticed a damn, bloody thing. . . . So he could look on the two of them, Roses and Liza, standing meekly side by side in front of his

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  desk, as simply a pair of recalcitrant kids. If they were sexing it up, that was their affair. He was the O.S. He didn’t hate Roses. He didn’t desire Liza. He was simply the O.S. Except that he wasn’t. And he did.

  He lectured the two of them severely (in a fatherly manner), and let them go. Then he dictated a memo for the Village notice board into his Autosec: all excursions outside the Village boundaries were forbidden until further notice. Not that it wasn’t probably too late. He already had a big file of inflammatory newspaper cuttings on his desk. And now this.... He got up wearily from his desk and went to the window. Roofs, treetops, here and there lights from uncurtained windows, and in the distance the moon-silver water of the Pill: such exquisite peace could never last, had lasted far too long already. It was a lie anyway, an elaborately constructed falsehood. And it aggravated his own un-peace. Abruptly he left the window and made his way, eyes on the ground, quickly home to Mrs. Berman who was as good as a mother to him.

  In spite of David Silberstein’s fears, his night was quiet. In St. Kinnow a lot of tables were thumped when Pete and Harry’s story was told. Crow-bars were flourished and bicycle chains slashed against unoffending chair legs. But the cause was so distant, so un-im- mediate. It was more rewarding, much more high, to wreak vengeance on the shops along the Esplanade.

  Next morning, though Liza was at the laboratory very early, Professor Kravchensky was there before her. The new accelerator was installed, and a new arrangement of filters. The professor scuttled up to her, wringing his hands aggressively.

  “Always when I want you, child, you are not here. Afternoons off, evenings out gadding. . . . Do you still work with me, or am I mistaken?”

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  He expected no answer. Perhaps he was being fair. Perhaps she did spend too much of her time with Roses. One of Roses’ great qualities was that he was always occupied, but never busy. .... She could think of no better way of living. So she told the professor she was very sorry.

  “Sorry? What is sorry? Last night the breakthrough comes, so what is sorry?” She moved to her place at the computer console, but he shooed her away. “I manage by myself once, I manage by myself again. You watch. Sometimes I think that is all you are good for.”

  She was willing to suffer him. She stood by the window, where he had bundled her, and watched. He was so happy, setting up the holographic viewer, so happy that she hadn’t been there to help him. And all the time the scene in front of her kept merging into that of the night before, the flash of the oar against the white sky, the blood, the soft, dead swan. Professor Kravchensky talked on, dragged her back with formulae, with chron- omic coefficients, with concepts . . . the stuff on which her life was, had always been, made.

  “Our mistake, child, has been to locate failure within the reentry period. Reentry is nothing, as natural as birth and probably much less painful. Last night I started at the other end, with the premise that molecular breakdown must occur at take-out, just beyond the visible spectrum.”

  He fussed with the Viewing screen. She was interested now, but forced herself to let his ancient, over-excited fingers take their time

  “So there was my problem. To see beyond the visible spectrum.” She thought at once of the Barron lightwave interruptor. But she said not a word. “So what did I do? I used the Barron light-wave interruptor. It extended the spectrum for me. Not much—a hundredth

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  of a second, then I got phase-through. But it was enough. Filmed in USM it was enough.

  At last he’d got the viewer right. He switched it on.

  “Observe, child. Observe.”

  Liza observed. In the tiny arena of the viewer there sprang up a hologram, the true image of a Victorian what-not, priceless, complete with red chenille bobbles and intricately fretted shelves. She was appalled—Daniel must have been out of his mind to part with it. Or had she not seen it in the professor’s own home, supporting his wife’s most precious ornaments? She watched it fade in ultra-slow-motion, and to the count of maybe five return—the quarter-second’s flicker that always preceded take-out. It stabilized, brilliantly actual, in the moment before chronomic unity.

  “Here’s where I’ve stretched the spectrum. Observe, child. Without the interruptor there’d be nothing visible by now.”

  And there, in the instant before unity, she saw the what-not change. The bobbles dulled, the shelves took on an almost liquid appearance, the brass inlays spread as the wood around them . . . melted? Not the right word. Shriveled? No better. Blended, merged, fused, charred . . . nothing was adequate. Professor Kravchen- sky leaned forward and stilled the viewer.

  “There,” he said. “There you have the moment of molecular decay. Within our reach all the time. Why we always assumed it occurred on reentry I shall never know.”

  Liza knew. She remembered discussions. She remembered being overruled. But she said nothing. These tilings were not important. She was young. There was plenty of time. . . . (Was there really any time at all? Was there more than a matter of days?) She concentrated on what the professor was saying.

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  “Once that much was clear, Liza, the rest was elementary. I had only to slow take-out and increase the de-buffering rate.” He spread his hands boldly. “This I did. While you were away, unavailable, wasting your hours, this I did. Perfection. Permit me to demonstrate.”

  Liza permitted him. He caused tables and plant pots and umbrella stands to slip in and out of chronimic unity with impressive dependability. The new technique worked. Every time. Even a single Penheniot iris, arranged by the professor with Japanese intensity in a milk bottle, went and came with no apparent ill effects. Liza was fascinated—and ashamed that in her heart she had patronized the old man. It was crassly unfair of her ever to have expected a great experimental scientist also to be a great man. After the successful transmission of live- matter, of the iris, what more remained? His theories, his whole life, was completely vindicated.

&nbs
p; All that was required now was tidying up: work on the electro-chronomic timing mechanisms, in particular. At the moment pacers brought subjects back out of unity with an error margin of anything up to forty percent. This was only, Liza thought, a very minor difficulty—already there were plans in the computer for a nucleic pacer that could be postulated to give total reliability. Her mind was playing with a much more delightful problem, the creation of a super-buffering effect that would enable cell structures to penetrate the chronocules in a reverse direction. The Simmons s.b. effect . . . a worthy companion to the Kravchensky Theory of the Chronos.

  At ten o’clock Professor Kravchensky stopped his demonstrations.

  “Early this morning, Liza Simmons, when I saw the technique was good, I decided to put a subject into longer unity. Nine hours. While the peripheral pacers

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  have never been known to be early, I suggest that we leave the platform free, just in case.”

  “What subject did you use?”

  “At two in the morning one may be forgiven for being a little skittish. And our subjects are always so staid. . ..” My God, Liza thought. “I filled an enamel hip-bath with bubbles, gardenia scented. I put a bubble-bath into chronomic unity. A bubble-bath . . .” He sighed at the beautiful memory. Then pulled himself together. “But I’m afraid you don’t approve.”

  “Of course I approve.” Of the reinclusion, if of nothing else. Also, any sense of humor was better than none.

  While he was waiting for the bubble-bath to rematerialize, Professor Kravchensky rang the O.S. to tell him the good news. The O.S. was enthusiastic, but in a curiously distant manner, as if a good part of his attention was elsewhere, looking out of the window, perhaps. Igor Kravchensky was unquenchable. He rang off, and at once put a call through to London. Everybody had to hear his good news, even (especially?) the Founder. Since the spotty dog debacle die professor, under a considerable cloud, had protected himself with huffy silence.