Collision with Chronos

by Barrington J. Bayley

  He remembered Blare Oblomot, and felt a sudden pang for that rebel’s protestations regarding the deviants. Poor Blare.

  He became aware of a murmur of energy, barely audible through the floor. The room suddenly seemed to shift, to tilt. Then it became steady again.

  Of course. He was in some kind of vehicle.

  He paced the room, which was lined with horizontal slats of a honey-brown material, and stopped before the instrument the dev had been standing beside when he awoke. It was mounted on a pedestal, like a washbasin. As he came near, its flat grey screen glowed with neutral light; words appeared.

  YOU ARE EN ROUTE TO INTERSTELLAR SPACE. The characters were neat, but functionally inelegant. There followed a diagram consisting of dots, some heavily, some lightly scored, superimposed by a series of concentric circles. An arrow left the centre and stabbed slowly out, jerking several times toward empty space.

  Heshke guessed it to be a star map, but he was no astronomer and it meant nothing to him.

  For a minute or two he waited, but the screen offered no further information. Just the same, he felt overawed. The civilisation to which he belonged could not undertake intestellar travel, though all the planets as far out as Saturn had been fairly well explored. It came as a blow to his sense of racial superiority to find these devs so advanced. Automatically his mind began seeking some explanation, one which would permit the fatal flaws of intellectual or spiritual inferiority with which all dev races were supposed to be cursed.

  Deep in thought he roamed the room. Absentmindedly he tried the door the dev had left by, pushing it and then pulling on a ledge set into the panel. To his surprise it slid open easily, vanishing into the wall.

  He peered into an empty corridor, slatted with honey-coloured ribs as was his room, and hesitated. Had the dev mistakenly forgotten to lock him in? After a few moments he slipped out and proceeded along the corridor, feeling absurdly guilty and exposed, glancing all around him and expecting to be recaptured any second.

  The corridor came to an end in a circular junction from which radiated other corridors. He hovered near the wall, peeping down each one in turn. Then he stiffened; a dev was striding out from a corridor to his right, unseen until this moment.

  Heshke decided instantly not to put up any resistance and turned to face the dev, his arms hanging limply by his sides. The dev’s stride broke for a moment and he looked at Heshke, his face speculative, interested. Then he raised his hand in what appeared to be some kind of greeting, nodded curtly and strode on past him.

  Heshke looked after his retreating back, astonished.

  “Citizen Heshke!”

  Startled, he turned. The voice was Lieutenant Gann’s. He came toward him down yet another corridor, at a near-run.

  “Thank Earth I’ve found you,” the Titan said breathlessly. “I was afraid they’d done something with you.”

  “You’re free too?”

  The other nodded. “So’s Ascar. These fiends don’t seem to care; we have the run of the ship.”

  “But why?”

  “Who can say? A dev mind is bound to be devious, devilishly twisted. Probably they want to study us, catch us off our guard.” He glanced around them, at walls, floor and ceiling, evidently seeking out spying devices.

  “Where’s Ascar?” Heshke asked.

  “In his room. He’s gone into a sulk, just sits there and won’t co-operate.”

  Heshke looked carefully into the Titan officer’s sharp face. He saw signs of nervous strain. Gann was intelligent, well-trained, but he was under pressure: in the very maw of hell, by his own doctrine.

  “Let’s keep moving,” Gann said in a mutter, nudging his arm. “Probably they can’t pick us up very well while we’re on the move.”

  He guided Heshke down another of the corridors, pacing swiftly and talking in a low, furtive mutter.

  “Keep your voice down,” he warned. “Don’t give them any more help than you have to.”

  “What have you found out?” Heshke asked.

  “We’re heading into interstellar space. Presumably this ship is equipped both with time-drive and some kind of interstellar-drive – but we always knew the aliens must have something like that. This disproves Ascar’s theory, anyway: his theory that the alien interventionists are indigenous to Earth.”

  “Aliens?” Heshke queried. “But …”

  Gann shot him a glance. “Isn’t it obvious? These devs are working with the aliens. It would be just like them, too. They must be taking us back to one of the alien home bases.”

  Yes, thought Heshke, to Gann it would make perfect sense. It would enable him to resurrect his belief in the Earth Mother; to clear her from the charge of infidelity, of having given birth to two legitimate sons.

  Doctrine apart, it made a certain kind of sense to Heshke, too.

  “How can we be sure?” he said doubtfully. “Couldn’t the devs themselves be responsible for all this?”

  Gann didn’t answer for a moment but glanced around him, gesturing with his hand. “I don’t think so, Citizen. You’ve seen this ship, what a high cultural standard it has. I don’t believe devs could have produced it. Besides, they would have had to invent the time-drive all by themselves, and that requires genius. Degenerate races don’t have that kind of intellectual genius. Cunning, yes – but not genius. No, Citizen, the aliens are behind this.”

  Again, the Titan tech’s reasoning sounded plausible. Heshke hurried to keep up with his swift strides. But, he thought, if Gann was right then that suggested that there was a conspiracy of cosmic proportions directed against True Man. …

  Gann nudged him again, directing him down a side turning. They passed through a sort of foyer, or salon, where a number of devs stood before a large wall screen on which enigmatic schematics processed. They discussed quietly among themselves, and paused only momentarily to glance up as Gann and Heshke passed them by.

  Gann remained silent until they were once more walking down an empty corridor. “Don’t you know who these people are?” he said, his voice rising slightly. “No, perhaps you wouldn’t … but I had plenty of instruction in race identification in training college.”

  “No,” Heshke said, “I don’t know who they are.”

  “They’re Chinks,” Gann told him. “The last group of them was supposed to have been exterminated five hundred years ago. Quite an interesting strain, as devs go. Tradition has it that their cunning was almost superhuman.”

  “Superhuman?” repeated Heshke wonderingly. “And yet you deny them intellectual ability?”

  “It’s more of an animal cleverness raised to a high degree. In devs the intellectual faculty is always perverted in some way, producing bizarre sciences and practices, yet it can involve extreme subtlety – in fact there used to be a saying: ‘the fiendishly clever Chink.’”

  Heshke found the phrase amusing and smiled, at which Gann shot him a sharp glance.

  “It’s no laughing matter. And you wouldn’t think so if you fell foul of a Chink puzzle.”

  “A Chink puzzle? What’s that?”

  “One of their weapons, capable of incapacitating the nervous system. Just some kind of ingenious contraption made of wire or bits of metal, apparently. But whoever it’s given to is instantly confronted with insuperable problems and riddles of such a nature that the mind is totally paralysed. The worst of it is that he can’t be released until the puzzle is solved, which only a Chink can do.”

  With a deep sigh, Heshke decided that perhaps his amusement had been too facetious, after all.

  “As you can see,” Gann concluded, “these people are natural candidates for alliance with the aliens. Perhaps they were allied with them all along.”

  “Well, what are we going to do now?”

  “Our duty is somehow to seize this ship if we can and take it back to Earth – and to the Absolute Present.”

  “But how?” said Heshke, overawed at such audacity.

  “I don’t know yet. I haven’t finished re
connoitring. But there doesn’t seem to be a very large crew.”

  “But even if we did take control – which doesn’t seem possible to me – how would we fly it?”

  “I can pilot a time traveller, and the alien version is basically the same as our own. We can manage it with Ascar’s help, even if I have to kick co-operation out of him.”

  The Titan stopped abruptly. They were in a broad passage – a sort of gallery – one side of which was covered with silk screens adorned with delicate, trace-like figures, of men, women and willow trees. The brushstrokes were sparse, economical but expansively eloquent.

  “Well, that’s the picture,” Gann said. “We may as well get back to our rooms now. I haven’t eaten yet and I’m hungry.”

  “Didn’t they give you any food?” Heshke asked him in surprise.

  “They left food of some kind. But I discovered the door was unlocked and decided action was more important. I’ve been all over the ship.”

  So that was why the Titan was so much ahead of him, Heshke thought. The man’s devotion to duty was total.

  “I don’t think I can find my way,” he said.

  “I’ll show you. Or else you can come back with me. It’s probably not safe to talk in our rooms, though.”

  Heshke allowed the. Titan to guide him through the corridors and to explain the general layout of the ship, which Gann had grasped in remarkably short order. Just before they parted, Heshke turned to face him, raising his finger as though bringing up a point of debate.

  “You speak of Chink puzzles. I’m still wondering why they’re content to let us wander around like this to plot and scheme. How do we know we’re not on the inside of one of those puzzles, being manipulated?”

  And the bleak, stubborn look on the face of the Titan showed that, he, too, had entertained this thought.

  It was hard to tell time on the Chink ship. The meals did not arrive regularly; they arrived as ordered. One had only to press one of the studs on the grey-screened pedestal and in a very short time a cheerful, smiling Chink would arrive, bearing a tray piled with the strangely spiced food.

  Lieutenant Gann ate but sparsely and devoted all his time to finding a way to seize the ship, a project in which Heshke, none too willingly, was embroiled. They soon abandoned, however, the ban on discussions in their rooms. Heshke had grown tired of charging through corridors with the indefatigable Titan – and besides, he pointed out, the Chinks on the ship appeared to understand very little Earth Language. Probably the rooms weren’t bugged at all.

  Experimentally they tried stating some outrageously violent intentions, but their captors failed to come charging in as Gann had expected.

  Both Gann and Heshke made efforts to talk to Leard Ascar. But the physicist seemed to have retreated even further into himself and barely acknowledged them. He ate vast quantities of the Chink food, calling for one dish after another, and seemed to relish Gann’s disgust for his exotic tastes.

  “Your ideas are all screwy,” he growled when Heshke tried to talk some reason into him. “And so are your theories.”

  Heshke was taken aback. One could not help but have respect for Ascar’s penetrating intellect, whatever the state of his mental health might be.

  “I’m surprised to see you take this attitude,” he admonished. “I thought you were as anxious to see the aliens defeated as anyone.”

  Ascar merely shrugged, scowling derisively, and continued engorging steamed rice in rapid spoonfuls.

  They returned to Gann’s room. “Plainly we can’t count on him to help at first,” the officer conceded reluctantly. “Nevertheless I don’t think he’ll refuse us technical assistance when the time comes. We’ll just have to tackle the dangerous part by ourselves.”

  Heshke, whose enthusiasm for the venture was less than he cared to admit, sighed. “I don’t see how we’re going to manage anything. Just us against the whole ship!”

  “It’s our duty to try, whatever the odds. Besides, if we fail it will still remain our duty to kill ourselves before this ship reaches its destination. We can’t allow them to interrogate us. So we have nothing to lose.” Gann looked grim. “We’ll have to kill Ascar, too.”

  “Very well. So what now?”

  “I’ve evolved a plan.” Gann reached into his tunic and drew out a sharp-bladed knife.

  “Where did you get that?” Heshke asked, astonished.

  “From the ship’s kitchen. I wandered in there, and managed to pick it up before they shooed me away.”

  “It’s still not much,” said Heshke doubtfully.

  “It’s not all. Wait.”

  He unbuttoned his tunic and pulled up his shirt, then probed a spot on his abdomen, just under his ribs, with his fingers. “Feel there.”

  Heshke obeyed. He felt a hard lump under the skin.

  “Something the Chinks don’t know about,” Gann said, with a note of satisfaction. “A vial of nerve gas.” Suddenly he thrust the knife at Heshke. “Here.”

  “What?” Heshke blinked.

  “Cut it out!”

  Though squeamish with distaste, Heshke complied. Gann lay down on the chair-couch and took the cuff of his sleeve between his teeth. Heshke plied the knife, uncomfortably aware of the other’s pain.

  Fortunately the capsule was only just below the skin. It had been cleverly grafted in, so that the skin showed no trace of surgery. Heshke wondered whether all Titans were similarly equipped. Probably they were, he thought. It was like all the other thoughtful touches of Titan elitism: the blood-group tattooed on the inside of each man’s arm, for instance.

  The capsule came out easily, an egg-shaped spheroid slippery with blood. “Thanks,” Gann gasped. “I could have done it myself, but I was afraid I’d make a mess of it.”

  “You’re bleeding quite a bit,” Heshke commented.

  Gann looked around, snatched up a cloth that covered a small table and tore a strip off it with strong hands. He passed it around his waist, binding up the wound.

  “That’ll do for now. This is our plan of operations. Heshke.” Gingerly he took the capsule, wiping off the blood. “Our first requirements are, one: weapons, and two: command of the control room. Now, most of these Chinks don’t seem to carry weapons, but you’ve seen those ones dressed differently from the others – wearing blue jackets with high collars?”

  Heshke nodded.

  “I’ve reason to think that they do. They’re probably officials or troops of some sort. There’s always one of them standing guard outside the control room. You’ll walk up to him and engage his attention. Then I’ll come up behind – right?” He brought up the knife, going through the motions of grasping a man from behind and cutting his throat.

  His stomach turning over, Heshke nodded.

  “Right. Then we’ll take his gun, and chuck the gas capsule into the control room. It’s very quick-acting, but disperses after about half a minute, so we’ll be able to take over. If anyone does come charging out before the gas gets him, we can simply shoot him.”

  “And what do we do then?”

  Gann frowned. “Then, I’m afraid, we’ll have to improvise. There’ll still be the rest of the crew to deal with. But we’ll be in a good position – at the nerve centre of the ship, and with plenty of weapons at our disposal. At least they’ll know they’ve been in a fight.”

  Murder isn’t my business, thought Heshke as they made their way toward the execution of Gann’s plan. I’m an archaeologist, a middle-aged archaeologist. I wish there was some way out of this.

  But there wasn’t.

  In a way their being devs made it easier; not like killing True Men.

  But even killing a dog was unpleasant.

  The thoughts were still spinning around in his mind when they came to the last intersection before the control room. Gann touched his elbow encouragingly and slipped off down a side passage.

  Heshke continued on until he arrived at the demilune where some swing doors gave entrance to the control room. There was always
a Chink standing here, like a commissionaire before the door of an expensive hotel. At the sight of him Heshke froze, momentarily paralysed. The Chink was so young, so affable-looking.

  The young Chink turned and saw him, apparently noticing the stricken look on his face. Lieutenant Gann hove into view on the other side, a tall, comparatively sinister figure. He surreptitiously motioned to Heshke to get on with it; Heshke took a step forward.

  And then, impatient with Heshke’s hesitancy, Gann sprang. He hooked an arm around the Chink’s neck, forcing his head back to expose his throat to the knife. Heshke’s eyes bulged; he couldn’t look, he couldn’t turn away.

  But just as the worst was about to happen something, a sliver of light, darted from the ceiling and struck Gann in the back. Scarcely any change of expression came over the Titan’s face; his body went limp, collapsing to the floor and nearly dragging the Chink with it.

  The Chink recovered his balance and stared down at the body, his eyes wide with consternation. Then he flung open the swing doors and shouted something in a high-pitched, singsong voice. More Chinks came running from the control room, looking first at Gann and then at Heshke and chattering to him, their faces expressing commiseration, concern, regret.

  One of them took Heshke by the arm and led him into the control room. He gazed blankly around at it, at the curved control panels sweeping by on either side, at the flickering screens whose rapidly changing images meant nothing to him.

  His guide stepped up to one of the panels and began punching something out on a keyboard. After a pause words appeared on a screen over the Chink’s head.

  Ship programmed protect itself. Very sad friend die. Should have warned. So sorry.

  Heshke nodded dismally, turned and walked back into the demilune, where a small crowd was still Collected. For some reason Ascar arrived. He stood looking down at the dead Lieutenant, his expression unreadable. Then he suddenly gave the Titan hooked-arm salute.

  “Salute to a brave officer,” he said wryly.