Collision with Chronos

by Barrington J. Bayley

  “Are you Citizen Heshke?” one demanded. He nodded.

  “Come with us, please.” They turned and strode off, leaving him to straggle after them.

  The slim figure of Titan-Captain Brask stood by the nearer hoverjet. “Good morning, Heshke,” he said in a supercilious but not unfriendly voice. “We did warn you to be ready. Unfortunately it seems we need you somewhat sooner than we thought we would.”

  Heshke said nothing, his brain still slow with sleep. “Is there anything you need to bring with you?” Brask asked politely. “Books, notes, charts? Well, we can supply anything you want, anyway.”

  He turned. Blare Oblomot was approaching, walking slowly between Titan escorts. In the background Heshke saw some of his helpers emerging from their tents to stare curiously, white figures in pre-dawn darkness.

  “Is my assistant Oblomot included in this project too?” he queried.

  Brask gave a short, sharp laugh. “Oh, we know all about him. He’s got a different destination.”

  As he came near, Oblomot gave Heshke a half pleading, half I-told-you-so look. Brask made a violent gesture with his arm.

  “Take him to Major Brourne at Bupolbloc Two. Heshke comes with us.”

  Heshke watched his friend being put aboard the second hoverjet, feeling sick inside. Bupolbloc Two, he thought. He hadn’t known there was a Number Two; hadn’t known that the building he had visited just yesterday was only Bupolbloc One.

  Suddenly he reminded himself that his small personal belongings and toilet requisites were still in his tent, but he decided against returning to collect them. Brask looked impatient, and anyway the Titans were very efficient at providing details like that.

  Numbly he climbed into the hoverjet. They surged upward and whined away to the north.

  Suddenly there was a glare of light and the sound of an explosion from one of the other helijets, the one carrying Blare Oblomot. Heshke gasped with shock, and saw the flaring skeleton of the jet plummeting earthward in the darkness.

  Brask jumped to his feet, cursing. “The fools! Didn’t they know enough to check him? He must have been carrying a suicide grenade!”

  Heshke tore his gaze away from the blaze on the ground and gaped at him. Brask gave him a sidelong glance.

  “You don’t know about these, do you? The underground has been using that trick quite a lot lately. Saves them from interrogation and takes a few of us with them.”

  Unsuspected vistas seemed to be opening up to Heshke. “I … no, I hadn’t known.”

  “Naturally, you wouldn’t. It’s not advertised on the media, and we have ways of discouraging rumour. Yes, there is an organised underground and your friend Oblomot was a member of it. You didn’t know that either – or did you?” Brask’s odd, quizzical gaze darted toward him.

  “No, I hadn’t known – not until tonight,” Heshke murmured.

  They hovered over the spot for a few minutes, watching the wrecked jet burn itself out. Finally one of the three remaining jets put down beside it. The other two continued the journey as the sun rose, whistling toward a destination that still had not been divulged to Heshke.

  3

  At the city of Cymbel they transferred to a fast intercontinental rocket transport. On board Heshke was given breakfast, but Brask said little during the two-hour journey. Once he went forward to the guidance cabin to receive a radio message and returned looking pensive.

  They had chased the twilight zone on their five thousand mile trajectory, so it was still early morning when they arrived at their destination. The rocket transport put down at what was evidently a private landing strip. A car drove up to take them to a low, massive concrete building a few hundred yards away.

  Once inside the building Heshke found himself confronted with the usual Titan combination of efficiency and bustle. The corridors literally hummed – he didn’t know from what source. Symbols whose meanings he did not understand signposted the way to various departments. He turned to Brask.

  “What is this place?”

  “A top secret research station.”

  “Is the artifact here?”

  Brask nodded. “That’s why this centre was set up – to study the artifact.”

  Heshke’s eyebrows rose. “Then how long ago was it found?”

  “Just over five years.”

  “Five years? And you’ve kept quiet about it all that time?”

  Brask smiled distantly. “Patience, Citizen. You’ll understand everything shortly.”

  They came to a heavy door guarded by two armed Titans. Brask presented a pass; the door opened with the sigh of a pneumatic lock.

  Beyond the guarded door the atmosphere was quieter and more calm. “This leads to the main research area,” Brask told him. “I’ll introduce you to your new colleagues shortly. They begin the day here with an ideological session – would you care to drop in on it? It must be nearly over now.”

  Resignedly Heshke nodded. Brask led him down a corridor and they entered a small auditorium. An audience of about two hundred white-smocked men and women faced a large screen which illustrated a commentary by means of a succession of pictures.

  The visualisation, Heshke noted, was skilled and professional. The scene at the moment was a soulful one of the sun setting over the forest-clad hills; in the foreground a deep blue sea lapped against a rocky, encrusted shore.

  But smoothly the picture merged into a slow collage of viruses and soil bacteria. The sudden transition from the expansive world of forest, sea and sun to the invisible, microscopic world at the boundary of life was, Heshke thought, effective. It caught his attention right away, and he listened with interest to the mature, persuasive voice that accompanied the vidtrack, knitting the brief scenes together into a coherent whole.

  “Here we have the germinal essence,” purred the voice on the audtrack. “In these primary particles of life the spirit and essence of the planet Earth has concentrated all its being. By means of a mighty distillation from the potentiality of rock and soil, sun, ocean and lightning, were created these seeds of all future things. From this moment Earth, which before was barren, has produced DNA; and from this DNA, like a giant rising from the sea, there inevitably springs in due season the culmination of the entire process: the entity for which all the rest of Terrestrial life is but a platform. This is known as the culminating essence, or the human essence.”

  The pictures that illustrated this speech were swift and dizzying. The virus forms vanished; momentary images of DNA helices, dancing chromosomes and dividing cell nuclei appeared one after the other, interspersed with a swift procession of diverse living species as the stages of evolution unfolded.

  At the end of the sequence, to coincide with the speaker’s last words, appeared the image of a young, naked male, godlike both in proportion and feature (and posed no doubt by a suitable Titan). The figure stood with arms outstretched, light streaming around his silhouette from a point source in the background, slowly fading into a picture of Earth swimming in space.

  “It follows,” continued the voice soberly, “that evolution is not a series of arbitrary accidents but a whole process, tending toward a predestined end. It follows that by nature Earth produces but one supreme species, this being her destiny, and it follows that this is a law holding for all planets throughout the universe. Earth is our mother, our home, our sustenance. From Earth’s soil we draw our blood. We are her sons; no one shall take her from us.”

  With a sonorous orchestral chord the screen went blank. Heshke was fascinated. Blood and soil, he thought again. There was much in the lecture that, paradoxically, was both appealing and repellent: the mysticism, the blatant Earth-worship, the belief in destiny. But who knows, he thought, there might be something in it. Perhaps evolution does work like that.

  The audience rose and filed out silently. Brask nudged Heshke. “Now you can meet the people you’ll be working with.”

  Three members of the audience stayed behind, going over to a small table at the back. Br
ask and Heshke joined them.

  Two of the men had the armbands and precise bearing of Titans. The third was a civilian, standing out from the others by reason of his sloppy slouch. He had a habit of glancing furtively around him, as if wishing he were somewhere else, and his mouth was twisted into a permanent expression of sardonic bitterness.

  Brask made introductions. “Titan-Lieutenant Vardanian, Titan-Lieutenant Spawart, Citizen Leard Ascar. Gentlemen, this is Citizen Rond Heshke.”

  All made brief bows.

  “Are you gentlemen archaeologists also?” Heshke asked as politely as he could, since he did not recognise their names.

  “No, we are physicists,” Leard Ascar said shortly. His voice matched his face, ironical, mocking.

  Brask motioned them to chairs. “It’s time to put you into the picture, Citizen,” he said to Heshke. “I hope you’re able to absorb strange facts at short notice, because you’ll need to.”

  He flicked a switch on a small console on the table. The big screen lit up, but for the moment remained without a picture.

  “We told you earlier that we had discovered an alien artifact in working order. You probably imagined it had been found in a dig or something of that sort. In point of fact it was discovered lying in the open on a grass field, quite accidentally, far from any known alien remains. Moreover it was obviously of very recent manufacture.”

  He flashed a picture on the screen. The background was as he had described: a grassy meadow, with a line of trees in the distance. Lying in the foreground was a silvery cylinder, rounded at both ends and with dull, rather opaque-looking windows set fore and aft. A Titan stood by it for size comparison, revealing it to be about seven feet in diameter and about twelve in length.

  “As you see, it’s a vehicle of some sort,” Brask continued. “Within were two aliens who appeared to have died shortly before of asphyxiation. As these were our first complete specimens they have increased our knowledge of the enemy to quite an extent.”

  The screen blanked for a moment and then flicked to another picture. The cylinder had been opened. The two occupants, seen partially because of the awkwardness of handling the camera through the opening, were strapped side by side in narrow bucket seats. They were small furry creatures with pointed snouts and pink mole-like hands, being perhaps the size of young chimpanzees. After a few seconds the picture flickered and the same two corpses were shown more completely, pinned to a slab in a Titan laboratory.

  Despite his excitement, Heshke found time to be pleased that the specimens resembled quite closely the reconstructions that had been attempted from skeletons.

  “So it was a spaceship,” he said.

  “That was naturally our conclusion, to begin with. But we were wrong. Only gradually, by experimenting with the vehicle’s drive unit, were we able to piece together what it did.”

  Heshke noticed that the physicists were all looking at the floor, as though hearing the subject talked about embarrassed them.

  “The equipment aboard the vessel used a principle completely unknown to us,” Brask went on. “Movement through space – through comparatively short distances of space, not interplanetary space – could in fact be achieved as a by-product, but that was not its main purpose. Its main purpose is to move through time. The artifact we had stumbled on was a time machine.”

  The physicists continued looking at the floor. Heshke let the bombshell sink into his mind.

  Time. A time machine. The archaeologist’s dream.

  “So they’re from the past,” he said finally, staring at the picture of the alien time travellers.

  Brask nodded. “That would be the assumption. Presumably they developed the means of time travel during the final stages of their sojourn on Earth, but too late to do them any good. We can only hope the secret is not known on their home world, but frankly I think we would have felt some effect from it if it was.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Heshke muttered. “The whole thing is – frightening.”

  “You’ve said it,” Brask responded.

  Heshke coughed nervously. “This field trip I’m going on,” he said after a pause. “It’s a trip through time?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Brask looked at Titan-Lieutenant Vardanian. “Would you care to explain?”

  The tall Titan physicist nodded and turned to Heshke.

  “You’ll appreciate that we had no intention of risking our only time machine in reckless jaunts. We’ve spent five years of hard work trying to grasp the operation of the time traveller so that we could duplicate it. Finally we completed our own operational traveller – so we thought – and have made some trips in it. But the results are such that we need your expert advice; we’re no longer sure that our traveller works properly.”

  Heshke didn’t understand what he meant. The Titan turned to the screen, reached for the control box and eliminated the image of the dead alien pilots. “Watch carefully. I’m going to show you some pictures our men took.”

  A flurry appeared on the screen, then an impression of racing motion as if some colourful scene were swinging wildly to and fro and passing by too swiftly to be grasped properly. After some moments Heshke discerned that the only stable element in the picture was a sort of rim on the upper and lower edges; he realised that this was the rim of another screen or window through which the camera was taking the sequence.

  He found it hard to believe that all this was really happening. Here he was seeing pictures from the past while an efficient, intelligent Titan officer calmly explained something he would have thought to be impossible. It made even the death of Blare Oblomot seem a shadowy, dream-like event.

  Suddenly the picture stilled. They looked out over an even landscape, the sun high in the sky. In the middle ground stood clumps of ruins stretching for several miles. Though so corroded and overgrown as nearly to have blended into nature, to Heshke’s trained eye they clearly showed their alien origin.

  “The Verichi Ruins, approximately nine hundred years ago,” Vardanian said quietly. “Not what you would expect, is it?”

  No, thought Heshke, it certainly wasn’t. Nine centuries ago the Verichi Ruins – ruins in the present century, that is – should have been in their prime: an inhabited, bustling city. He watched an armoured figure stumbling about some heaps of stones. “It’s more like what they’ll be nine centuries in the future,” he agreed. “Maybe you were headed in the wrong direction?”

  “Our conclusion also, at first,” Vardanian told him. “Initially we made five stops, all inside a bracket covering two centuries. We failed to find any living aliens at all, merely ruins such as you see here. However, it didn’t take long to ascertain that the wars of collapse – the death-throes of classical civilisation – were in progress simultaneously with the existence of these ruins. So we were in the past after all.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” Heshke objected, frowning.

  “Agreed. According to everything we know there was a large alien presence at the time of the wars of collapse. Could we be wrong? Could the alien presence have been much earlier? That would explain the dilapidated condition of the ruins – but it would not explain their much fresher condition today. Frankly, none of the historical explanations make much sense. So we were forced to draw other, more disappointing conclusions: that the time traveller was playing tricks on us, that we weren’t travelling through time at all.”

  “You’re beginning to lose me. Where were you going?”

  Vardanian gestured vaguely, as though searching for words to express thoughts he only understood as abstract symbols. “There are some peculiarities about the time-drive that suggest other possibilities. In order to work at all it has to be in the presence of a wakened consciousness; an unmanned, automatic time traveller simply wouldn’t move. So a living pilot is one of the essential components. Bearing this in mind, we were able to formulate a theory that the traveller – the one we have built, at any rate, ev
en if not the alien one – fails to move through objective time. It enters some region of ‘fictitious time’, and presents to the consciousness of the observer elements from both the past and the future blended together, probably drawing them from the subconscious imaginations of the pilot and passengers.”

  “It’s all an illusion, you mean?”

  The other nodded doubtfully. “Roughly speaking, yes. Though the time traveller obviously does go somewhere, because it disappears from the laboratory.”

  Heshke noticed that throughout the latter part of this explanation Leard Ascar scowled and muttered under his breath. Vardanian glanced at him pointedly. “That, with one dissenting vote, was the explanation we had adopted until yesterday.”

  “And then you showed us those photographs,” Brask put in. “That upset things somewhat.”

  Yes, the photographs. The pictures that showed the Hathar Ruins three centuries ago, and showed them in worse condition than they are today. The pictures that obviously – perfectly, clearly, obviously – were faked. The pictures that could not possibly be true.

  “It was too much of a coincidence,” Brask said. “Here was independent, objective evidence of the findings that we had thought were subjective and illusory. We immediately dispatched the time traveller to Hathar at around the time these photographs were presumably taken, and took a corresponding set of photographs from the same viewpoints.” He opened a drawer underneath the table and withdrew a sheaf of glossy prints. “Here are copies of both sets. Check them: you’ll find they match, more or less.”

  Heshke did as he was told, looking over the prints. One set was in colour, the other – the old ones – in monochrome. He pushed them away, feeling that he was being surrounded by too much strangeness for one day.

  “Yes, they look similar. What does that prove? That you did travel back in time after all?”

  “Yes,” said Leard Ascar fiercely, speaking for the first time.

  And the other Titan, Spawart, also spoke for the first time. He adopted an expression of meticulous care, choosing his words slowly. “It may not necessarily mean that. We can’t really take these photographs as substantiating our own findings. They could have been faked. Or, knowing now that time travel is possible, they could have been displaced in time, owing their origin to our future. There are a number of possibilities which do not rule out a malfunction in our time traveller.”